Burgundy Velvet
by Defying.Expectations
Summary: A collection of unrelated Toddvett/Sweenett one-shots. Love, hate, passion, pain; alternate universe and canon-compliant; short and long. But all sealed with a kiss. For Livejournal's 30 Kisses challenge.
1. Butterfly

**A/N: **So, as it says in the summary, this is going to be a collection of thirty unrelated Toddvett/Sweenett one-shots written for the 30 Kisses challenge on Livejournal. The only rules of the challenge are that each fic contain your chosen pairing, be inspired by one of the thirty prompts, and contain a kiss.

Now, I should warn you right now that though one kiss per story is mandated, there are no rules about the kiss. The kiss does not have to be between the author's chosen couple. The kiss can be on the lips, on the cheek, on the shoe, or wherever the characters please. The kiss could even just be two hands brushing, or a character imagining being kissed. So please do not throw rotten fruits at me if the kiss in the one-shot is not what you had originally hoped for. ;]

Credit for the title of this little collection of fics goes to the lovely unamuerte. Some months ago, I was yammering about how, even though most people in the ST fandom refer to Sweeney/Nellie as Sweenett, I've always preferred Toddvett. Carries a dark, seductive undertone that has always seemed more fitting to me for the pairing, as Sweenett sounds like something cute and fluffy, which really doesn't match the personas of our favorite barber or baker. She responded that Sweenett reminded her of a candy, whereas Toddvett gave her the image of burgundy velvet. I fell in love with the analogy, and, thus have stolen it for my title.

As always, feedback of any length and harshness is appreciated, so please do drop a review in my starving writer's tin.

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30 Kisses prompt #1: look over here; fanfic50 prompt #37: butterfly.

* * *

"Mr. Todd – look over here."

He doesn't. She's not surprised. Setting her jaw, she stares ahead.

"It's a butterfly," she whispers to he who never listens, feet brushing across the ground and legs folding beneath her until she kneels beside the creature. It's poised on a tulip, and the rare London sunrays make its blue and brown wings sparkle.

She goes perfectly still. It's been a dream of hers ever since she was a girl to have a butterfly perch upon her skin, if only for a moment, a breath.

"What're you doing?" Sweeney grunts as he stomps up behind her.

His movement startles the butterfly: in a burst of colors it takes flight into the skies, into the heavens, into where she can never ascend.

She lets out a sigh and tilts her head back. He stands behind her, scowling at some indistinct spot over he shoulder, towering over her kneeling body.

"Mr. T, silly man," she says, "what're_ you_ doing? Can't you see that I was trying not to move or speak?"

His brow furrows. "You're always moving and speaking."

"There was a butterfly," Nellie says, exasperated. "I was being still so it'd land on me, but then you went and scared it off."

"Oh," he says, and, apparently satisfied now that he knows the reason for the disturbance in routine, he drifts away from her and reclaims his place at the base of the willow, glaring at nothing.

Shaking her head, she resumes staring at the flower, now empty.

"Why?"

At first she thinks she's imagining his voice. But then he calls the word out again and she realizes she's not. She shifts on her knees so she's facing him.

"Why what, love?" she asks.

He's looking right at her this time and it nearly stops her heart cold. "Why do you want a butterfly to land on you?"

She forces herself to inhale. "I . . . I dunno, love. It's just always been a fancy of mine, that's all. I mean – I know my life won't be any different afterwards, if a butterfly ever chooses to land on me, but – "

But she dreams on.

But she doesn't know what more to live for than dreams.

Something brushes against the back of her palm and her words halt as she gasps in shock, her other hand raising, fisting, ready to fight off whatever person's got it in their head to hurt her.

Then she freezes.

A butterfly rests against her skin.

She doesn't dare move, doesn't dare think, doesn't even dare breathe. Heat prickles up her body and gathers in her heart and pumps warm, invigorating blood through her veins, starting and ending at the back of her left hand, at the spindly, graceful legs that are thin as needles and light as feathers.

She sits and watches and marvels for a heartbeat that lasts an eternity – and then the butterfly's wings kiss her flesh one final time before it flits off.

When she looks up, dazed and blearied-eyed, he's looking at her like he's never seen her before. And maybe he hasn't.


	2. Starlight

**A/N: **Not sure what to make of this one. Wrote it for a Dirty Dozen Friday challenge on The Write Prompts (dot) Com (lovely website for writing warm-ups, by the way). For the challenge, you're given a list of a dozen words and told to write a story containing them. Somehow, this little rambling came pouring out of my fingers. I don't know if it makes any sense - I was suffering from writer's block at the time, as well as being rather emotionally confused - but I figure I have nothing to lose by sharing it with you all.

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Prompt #8: our own world.

* * *

He used to be fascinated by the starlight. The thousands of pinpricks in the sky, burning brightly miles away, so unobtainable and brilliant, so beautiful. So like Lucy.

But then Lucy was his and the starlight still burned bright and brilliant and even more beautiful, but it was no longer unobtainable. It was there.

_Here._

Now it's gone.

He presses his thumb to the window and blocks out a star from his eyes, extinguishes its glow. But the other stars are still there, bright and brilliant and beautiful and so far away, too far away, and he can press his thumb over as many lights as he wants but they will continue to shine, incandescent and indifferent to his longing, to how he will never again hold their brilliance and beauty in his hand.

"Mr. T?"

Her cockney dialect shatters the silence and he despises her for destroying its glory.

"Why're you always standing by the window, love?" she asks, sidling up to him. "The view's not going to change all that drastically, y'know. People come, people go, then they do it all over again."

He doesn't answer. She likes to pour her various tidbits of 'wisdom' on him, and the best response to this nonsense of hers is no response at all.

Lucy never talked nonsense. Lucy was poised and elegant at all times. Well, no, perhaps this is not entirely true. She'd been speechless when he proposed to her. Or had it been when she realized she was pregnant? Or both times?

His thumb grinds against the window pane as he scours his memory, digging in every crevice. Yes, it had been when he proposed – her stomach had not yet been rounded – or had he just not noticed the protruding belly during the initial discovery of her pregnancy, stunned as he was by the news? –

_Face it, Todd. You're forgetting her._

But that is ridiculous. Lucy is his life, his every intake of air, and how could he ever forget how to breathe?

He knows how to breathe. He knows how to live. Yet if he also is a demon caverned in hell, then he must not be alive. How does he know if he's alive? How can he know?

"Busy day down at the shop," Lovett continues on, perfectly at ease with carrying on a conversation by herself – or perhaps perfectly unable to function any other way. Either way, he's thankful; participating in actual dialogs of her trivial, rustic nature is a hassle. "I'm downright thankful for it, of course – certainly beats not being busy – but my bones do start to ache after a point."

He and Lucy shared a bond, a constitution, a promise – _no, not shared – share_ – a promise that never fades – they share a life. They are as eternal as the stars, as the white beams bursting from the skies, spilling light upon all they touch, stealing that light from some humans even when not justified to do so –

Lovett ruptures his thoughts as she reaches up a hand, her eyes smoldering with pained devotion, and brushes her fingers through his wiry hair, trying to justify her presence with more than words, to bring him to where she is.

To remind him what it is to live.

To give him light even though she has none.

He seizes her face between his palms and crushes her lips with his own. It's a demand, not a request – although he has no idea what he's demanding of her, what he's asking, needs – but she responds in kind, pressing against him, hanging onto his cravat and drinking in his brutal kiss as though it's the elixir of life itself. Maybe it is.

Twisting limbs around heated bodies, ripping at fabric and laces and buttons, thieving passion whether it is rightly theirs or not, coalescing as one, they sink to the floor – and the stars cannot burn bright enough to see.


	3. Soft Slumber

Prompt #26: if only I could make you mine.

* * *

His face is so soft when he sleeps. So innocent, vulnerable. He looks more like Benjamin Barker than he ever does during these rare, tender heartbeats, and though she knows full well that this man is not Benjamin – nor does she want him to be – she can't help but see the resemblance. Such a naïve expression barely deserves to be called an expression of Sweeney Todd's . . . yet here it is.

She sits on the edge of his cot, watching his slumber, studying him. How can a man so beautiful be so broken? Or is he beautiful because he is broken? Is beautiful a word for those with no scars on their porcelain skin, or a word for those who conceal the wounds?

Her hand reaches out and grazes his cheek. She exhales in relief when he does not awaken. He never permits her to do this when he is conscious. He does not allow her to imprint his features in her mind with her careful gaze or touch him with gentle fingertips, for he does not allow himself to be human.

Her fingers skim across his temple, his hairline, down to his jaw, hesitating before brushing his lips. What she would give to kiss him just once with tender lips, soft as butter and slow as patience, a kiss to last an eternity, unhurried by carnal lust – unhurried because there is no hurry – because this is all that they need, because_ they _are all that will ever be . . .

Her neck bends, face lowering to greet lips with lips, eyes fluttering shut as she feels his even breathing on her face, her hand sliding from his lips to cup his cheek –

A hand seizes her fingers and she gasps, eyes shooting open. His obsidian gaze stabs her face.

"Get out," he hisses, his breath hot and angry against her lips.

She can't move.

"_Get out,"_ he snarls, flinging her hand from his grasp, and she staggers off his cot, stumbling backwards until her hand finds the door and throws it open. She bolts away without another glance, his skin still smooth and warm beneath her fingertips, his breath still scalding and accusing on her face – accusing her of taking advantage of his vulnerable state, accusing her of forgetting her place . . .

Accusing her of being in love. Of allowing herself to be human.


	4. Come What May

**A/N:** An alternate ending.

First two lines borrowed from #storystarters on Twitter.

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Prompt #20: the road home.

* * *

_Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day. _ _- William Shakespeare_

xxx

He loved fishing. There was no better way to dispose of a body than to use it as bait one piece at a time. Fish, as it turned out, devoured one another just as greedily as humans. He cast his line into the water and smiled: It would be lovely to have a piece of cod or herring on the dinner table tonight – perhaps even salmon.

"Haven't given up your old ways, I see."

He did not look at her as she approached. He merely watched from his peripheral vision as she seated herself upon a neighboring rock, tucking her arms around her legs and resting her chin against her knees.

"I never went fishing in London," he replied, lowering his line further into the choppy depths of the Pacific Ocean.

"Oh, don't act thick with me, Mr. Todd," she said. There was no anger to her tone, merely blithe resignation. "You know that never worked – and you know exactly what I'm talking about."

He raised an eyebrow at the water. "I don't, actually."

"Mmm. Perhaps I should've said, 'Haven't given up your old ways, I _smell_.'"

"You – you still remember the smell?" was all he could articulate.

She snorted. "'Course I still remember the smell. Had it rubbed into my skin like perfume for a year of my life, didn't I? I think I should know bloody well the stench of cooked human flesh – "

"Kindly keep your voice down," he implored mildly, watching the ocean waves bob beneath him. "I was merely expressing surprise. It was many years ago. Memory fades with age – as do many things."

"Clearly not _that_ many," she said with an eye roll in the direction of his fishing line. "Not long ago enough for you to've forgotten your usual bloodthirsty habits."

"My barbershop in this town is quite reputable, Mrs. Lovett. Only the occasional miscreant receives – ahh – a bit too close of a shave."

"The 'occasional miscreant,' eh? How occasional is occasional?"

"Occasional enough for no one to bat an eyelid when someone does go missing," he returned matter-of-factly. "They are never people who will be missed – murderers, rapists, abusive husbands, men who had desecrated the privileges society'd granted them . . . this fellow was my first in three years . . ."

His fishing pole jerked forward: a fish had caught hold of the bait. Without hesitation, he began to reel in the line, pressing his jaws together to suppress a groan as the muscles in his arms grumbled: old age had stolen much of his strength.

And his speed too, apparently.

"Lovely," she proclaimed as the hook emerged from the water, empty of both fish and bait. "Absolutely marvelous."

He fitted a new bit of bait upon the hook. "I did not ask for a commentary, Mrs. Lovett."

"You never asked for anything much, love, but that's certainly never stopped me."

Her eyes roasted against the side of his face as he dipped his fishing line beneath the waves again, but he kept his gaze upon his task. The pair fell into a cradle of quiet. Never one to enjoy silence for long, however, she soon shattered it. For some reason, he found himself holding back at the familiarity of her chattering habit:

_Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day . . ._

"You don't seem surprised to see me," she said.

"I saw you arrive in this town several days ago."

"And you didn't come and greet me like a proper neighbor? My goodness, Mr. T, where're your manners?"

When this jesting didn't earn any sort of reaction, she sobered again and said quietly, "You also don't seem angry to see me."

He twisted his lips into a smile. "Would you like me to be angry?"

"'Course not." He could practically hear the skin of her forehead wrinkling as she studied his profile. "I just don't understand why you're not. Mind you, I didn't come here with the intention of finding you – "

"Why _did_ you come?"

"For God's sake, Mr. Todd – why d'you think?"

At an honest lose for an answer – and for once, desiring to hear one from her – he looked at her. It was the first time he had looked at her since she had perched upon the rock beside his. It was the first time he had looked at her in decades.

Age hasn't done her already-haggard appearance any favors: the pale flesh was now dashed with senile freckles and wrinkles; the angular bones sharp beneath the sagging skin; the undomesticated, rosewood-colored curls daubed with white. Yet there was a gleam in the smirking brown eyes, a light – _life_ – that he had never seen before. It added youth to the wearied countenance; it revealed a glimmer of the vibrant spirit that lurked just beneath the timeworn body.

She looked back at him, exasperated.

"Why d'you think I came here?" she repeated, and then, realizing he could not answer, told him: "The _sea_, Mr. Todd."

Of course.

_That's the life I covet . . ._

His mouth creased in thought. Yes, he did indeed now live her coveted life by the sea – although why she coveted it so, he couldn't fathom. The ocean's waves were choppy and cold, far too cold for even dipping one's toes in; the sand so rough one could feel blisters suppurating from the moment their feet grazed the ground; and the smell – by God, the smell – he did not even want to begin to discuss the smell: that disgusting, fermenting odor of salted seaweed and decayed sea creatures that smeared itself on the skin like a disease and was just as difficult to eradicate from the flesh.

"Knew I'd make it out here eventually," Nellie continued, oblivious to his disdain, her eyes shinning with what he could not see. "Was only a matter of time, really. Been in Colorado for some time – bone-dry as a place could be, it is. Anyway, this seemed like as good a time as any to finally live my old fantasy, since the grandkids liked the idea of being on the coast – "

"The grandkids?" he found himself repeating foolishly. "Your grandkids?"

"Well, not mine by birth," she muttered.

"Toby's children?"

"No," she said, voice flat, punctuating her sentence much sooner than her long-winded babble usually permitted, and he knew not to question further on this particular subject.

"How long have you been in America?" he asked instead.

"Long as you have, love." At his questioning look: "I trailed the ship you boarded that night."

He knew 'that night' referred to the evening in the bakehouse; the evening of bloodied hands and unclothed secrets and murder upon body and soul; the evening of pain, raw and throbbing, pain, too much pain, so much pain it had seemed at the time as though it would never end or even lessen . . .

"I took the boat leaving for America the very next day," she went on. "I don't know how I was thinking I'd find you once I got here – who I'd ask or what documents I'd search – then again, I don't think I was thinking much at all when I boarded. . . . Anyway, when I arrived with vague designs to trail after you, I'd no clue where you'd went. So I had to make my own path."

Her lips, more cracked than they once were but still thin and pink and – _probably still very warm_, he found himself thinking, but stopped that thought cold – warped into a congealed smile. "And somehow, decades later, that same damned path's led me right back where I started."

The fishing line jerked; he snapped to attention and pulled it in as fast as he could, but his efforts, yet again, were for naught: the fish had stolen his bait and fled. Aged face pleating into a frown, he fitted a new piece of human meat upon the hook and cast it into the water.

"What about you?" Nellie asked. "How'd you wind up here? And why?"

He shrugged. "I knew I needed to leave London before the police cottoned on to our joint businesses – which they were bound to do very soon, considering the evidence strewn about the place after that night. I boarded the first ship I could find, and it happened to be bound for America – New York, to be precise."

"But why come to Oregon?" she persisted.

"Why not?" he said. "It was merely where people with nothing but the clothes on their back and a burning need for a new life were going at the time."

She seemed to measure out her next words before she said them, weighing and calculating their value, the potential reactions they might receive: "And how _is_ your new life here?"

_How is your life after what I did to you?_ her aching silence whispered. _How is your life after what you did to yourself?_

"I have no complaints, Mrs. Lovett," he said, and she gave him a hard, swift look, searching for the lie in his face, but there was none to be found.

"You never answered my other question," she accused, after clearing her throat.

"I apologize, my dear, I didn't intend to not answer. My memory is not what it once was."

Her chin lifted, thrusting her stubborn jaw into the air. "I see no need for mockery, Mr. Todd."

"This isn't mockery. What was the question?"

"Why aren't you angry with me?"

He danced his fingers along his fishing pole, ran them along the smooth wood. It wasn't one of his razors, and certainly never would be. Nonetheless, it had proven a good friend over the years, and had remained strong, sturdy. Loyal.

"Mr. Todd?" she prompted, a dash of impatience in her tone. "You listening to me? Why aren't you angry? Don't tell me you've forgotten and forgiven everything that happened all those years ago?"

"Time heals all wounds," he replied buoyantly. "And a good deal of time has gone by since we resided on Fleet Street."

She shot to her feet so fast that his head snapped up in shock: how did such a frail little body manage to move so quickly?

"Haven't changed a bit," she snapped. "Still the same stupid habits, the same stupid ways – if you aren't listening to me, then you're just ignoring me, and if you aren't ignoring me, you're just playing little word and mind games . . . well, I'm sick of it, Todd. I'm sick of it and I don't have to put up with it anymore. I've made myself stronger than this, I've got a life that's not tangled up in yours any longer – and, living in the same town now or not, I don't see why I should change that."

With that, she lifted her foot and made to stalk away, but he caught her hand.

Her fingers threaded with his at once – seemingly on reflex, for next second she was attempting to pull away.

"Let go of me, you great useless – "

"What would be the point in anger?" he murmured.

She stopped flailing. He met her eyes and waited.

"I – well, I don't know, love," she said. "But you very nearly tossed me into a sodding oven God knows how many years ago 'cause of that anger of yours, and if you hadn't been distracted by Toby lifting the sewer grate, I think you would've gone ahead and done the deed, so I just don't see what's caused the sudden attitude shift – "

"Thank you," he interrupted her.

Her jumbled words halted as her brow furrowed and, for a long moment, she could only stare at him in silence.

He studied her hand in his: her skin was far more crinkled than it used to be, and it meshed with his own wrinkles as he pressed their hands together. Her touch, though, was the same: callused palms, long nails, spindly fingers; her grip, as always, an ambiguity: firm, careful, warm.

Frowning, she sank back onto the rock, their hands still folded together.

"Thank you – for what?" she asked.

Without knowing why, he bent his head and kissed each of her knuckles, one by one. Her natural fragrance, too, was the same: flour, coriander, smoke, cinnamon, a hint of blood beneath it all. Her hand quivered in his.

"For all that you taught me," he said. "To have the patience to wait. Not to overindulge. Wasting nothing I have. How life is for the alive." He paused. "And that it always goes on."

The fishing pole, still held firm in his left hand, quaked. At once he dropped her hand and clasped the pole, reeling in the line, fingers working faster than any man his age should have been able, and then –

"Sweet Jesus!" she yelped as a writhing fish appeared suddenly in the air before them and was thrown upon a net. It wriggled about, heaving and flopping, gills beating furiously, until it ceased altogether all at once like the grand, final note to a symphony.

Triumphant, he smiled at his catch.

The smile faded as his eyes stumbled into hers: Her expression was one of grave intensity again, and her lips were parted in the beginning of a question – but he did not want to hear whatever it might be. So, rare though it was for Sweeney Todd, he asked a question of his own:

"I can't eat this fish by myself. Care to join me for dinner tonight?"

Her lips puckered then opened in a different shape, the shape of either a fresh inquiry of her own, or an answer to his. He never found out which, for at that moment a new voice made itself heard:

"Nellie!"

Both of them turned their heads towards the holler: an elderly man with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching mustache stood some miles off in a low doorway, one arm waving in their direction. Sweeney could not tell from this distance, but from his cheerful, loving inflection, he guessed the man was smiling.

"I should go," she said, and, at his lifted brow, explained, "that's my husband."

His lips swerved into a smile. "And here I've been calling you Mrs. Lovett all this time. You should have told me you'd wed and changed your name, my dear."

"Oh, but I haven't changed my name, love," she replied with the devilish grin he remembered all too well.

He rolled his eyes. "You, a Lucy Stoner. I should have known."

"You should've," she agreed, still grinning, but as she got to her feet their eyes met and her grin fell away in a sudden fit of nameless uncertainties. "Well – I'm sure we'll see each other now and again, being neighbors and all – "

"I'm sure we will."

"But for now – g'bye, Mr. Todd."

"Good-bye, Mrs. Lovett."

She wiggled her fingers in farewell and flashed him a genuine grin before turning around and beginning the slow, unsteady dawdle of the elderly who should be using a cane and yet stoutly refuse to. Smiling, Sweeney gathered his fishing materials and his day's catch in his hands, then started towards home.

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**A/N: **Reviews are love.


	5. On Cats And Company

**A/N: **Warning: complete and utter nonsense.

This is something of a sequel to my drabbles Intuition I and II (which can be found in both _Moments_ and _Of Rolling Pins and Rubies_), but can probably be understood just as easily on its own.

* * *

Prompt #24: good night.

* * *

When he comes downstairs and enters her shop, Lovett is not there.

Sweeney scowls at the empty table. Where's the bloody woman wandered off to now? It is their routine to share a bottle of gin every night come half past ten. Has she forgotten? Does she simply not care? Either scenario is simply unacceptable.

He stalks to her bedroom and throws open the door without preamble, but she's not in there. He tramps back down the hall and through the kitchen, and as he approaches the parlor, he hears giggling.

Sweeney clenches his teeth. He hates her laugh. It's this awful, high-pitched howl of a laugh that makes him desire nothing more than to slice open her throat and destroy any chance of ever hearing that noise again.

But that, of course, would mean that he would have to bake the human pies himself, and that would never do: cooking is women's work.

Jaws bound together, he prowls into the parlor. Lovett is sprawled belly-down on the carpet, legs bent at the knees and waving lazily in the air, breasts nearly spilling from her dress, lips pulled into a smile bright enough to put the sun to shame. The cat sits in front of her.

Lovett flicks a penny into the air and chortles when the animal springs after it, not seeming to care when the cat swipes for the coin and accidentally scratches a wood leg of the sofa. Her cheeks are flushed a charming crimson, seeming to remove several years from her face.

He forces his eyes away from his landlady and, when he remembers why he is here, growls, "Mrs. Lovett."

"Oh, hello, love," says Mrs. Lovett, and he watches her flash him a smile from his peripheral vision. "Didn't see you there. Care to join me and Jamesetta? That's what I've decided to call her, by the way – Jamesetta. Lovely name, don't you agree? Jamie for short, I think, or perhaps Jamesie – "

"Mrs. Lovett," Sweeney cuts off her blathering. "I need gin."

No reply. He looks at her and she's no longer smiling.

"Then go get some," she says, her gaze on her fingers as she scratches the puss behind its ears. "You know where I keep the bottle."

He's stung by her rejection, though he doesn't know why. He spares a glance towards the cat – who looks at him with wide-set, merciless yellow eyes – then once towards Lovett – who doesn't look at all.

Without a word, he stalks into the kitchen, slamming through cupboards and walloping counters with bottles until finally he sits at the table with one lone gin flagon and a tumbler. He takes a swallow, suppresses a grimace, then downs another.

He drinks on for some time, as per the routine, but the routine doesn't provide the comfort that it usually does. Deciding that it's because he needs more to drink, he heaps another serving of gin into his tumbler and downs it in one gulp.

_Don't be stupid. You don't need more gin. You need company._

Sweeney shakes this thought off with a scowl. Company? Ridiculous. He despises company, and were it up to him, were he not obligated to rid the world of its filth, he would shut himself in his room all day and night long, perfectly content to never so much as see another human again.

All of this is completely true – so he can't explain why he suddenly finds himself on his feet and marching back into the parlor.

The scene no longer contains the energy it did some minutes previous, for both cat and landlady are at rest now. Lovett reclines on the settee, the cat in her lap. Her hand sedately strokes the beast, eyes closed.

He stops and stares and is about to retreat to the kitchen, slip away before he disturbs either of them, but her eyes fly open and land on him before he can do so.

"G'evening, Mr. Todd," she murmurs.

He makes a vague gesture at the ceiling with the gin bottle. "Do you want to join me?"

"I'm fine here, thanks," she replies. She cuts her gaze towards the cat: a dismissal. A silent confession of pain.

Pain that he caused.

Sweeney swallows. "I – I'd like you to join me."

That draws her eyes back to him. She regards him with one raised eyebrow, then scoops the cat into her arms and follows him back to her shop.

"Thanks for the invite, love," she says as she pours herself a tumbler.

Sweeney shrugs a shoulder and takes a long swallow. She returns her attention to the cat, who stirred from its slumber when she carried it into the next room, cooing and rubbing her fingers just below its ears.

"You're really keeping it, then?" asks Sweeney.

"Jamesetta is not an it – Jamesetta is a she. And yes, I'm keeping her." She lifts her eyebrows. "Is that a problem?"

"No," says Sweeney.

"Really?" says Lovett, a dangerous smiling hoisting onto her lips. "You seem rather jealous of her – of the way I wasn't paying any attention to you 'cause I was putting it all on her . . ."

"Why on Earth would I be jealous of a cat?" he mumbles, taking a dismissive swallow of gin. "But what's Mrs. Mooney to do?"

"Oh, bugger that woman. She'll just have to find other pusses 'cause she certainly can't have my Jamie." Her eyes blaze towards him again. "Want to hold her?"

The cat's in his lap before he can answer 'no.'

"Go on, love, pet her," Lovett coaxes with another horrible little laugh that causes him to wince and forces him to wonder why he ever desired her company in the first place. "She won't bite you. That's my job," she adds, grinning and poking him the ribs.

With no other option, Sweeney places his hand against the animal's back and brushes his fingers against its fur once.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" Lovett asks.

Jamesetta kisses Sweeney's palm with her nose, begging for more.

"Keep the cat if you want, Mrs. Lovett," says Sweeney, lifting the creature by the scruff of its neck. The cat mews in protest as he sets it upon the ground. "I don't have to approve."

She pouts at him. "You two could get along fabulously well if you'd only be willing to try and – "

Sweeney leans over and smothers her lips with his own: sometimes this is the only way to get the bloody woman to shut up.

"I think it's time for bed, Mrs. Lovett," he mutters when he pulls away.

Smiling with lips swollen and red from the kiss, eyes sparkling with hazy desire, she nods.

He smirks and tugs her towards her bedroom and fails to notice that the cat follows them.


	6. In The Dark Beside You

30 Kisses #4: our distance and that person; fanfic50 #15: temperature.

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His hands sink into the ground, clawing at mud, ripping chunks of the earth from their rightful home as he crawls beneath the blackened sky. Clothes plaster to his skin, hair flattens to his face, dripping, sopping, cold, but he cannot feel any of it. Eyes roam, scouring gravestones, searching, searching for what he cannot find, what is not there . . .

"Mr. Todd!"

Then she is there, kneeling beside him, grasping his shoulders, yet he ignores her presence: she is not why he is here.

But she does not let go.

"You fool, Mr. Todd, what the hell d'you think you're doing? You'll catch your death out here – or did you not notice that it's raining hard enough to shake the heavens?"

He turns his gaze to her, pale-faced, shaking. Raising his hands from the earth – fingers still poised like talons to rip through dirt or grass or life itself if they have to, mud oozing from his fingertips – he is a demon rising from the pits of hell, searching for a salvation that he both craves and mocks.

Something in her eyes recoils, but she remains next to him, fingers piercing his shoulders, dress clinging soddenly to her body in a second skin.

"Where is she?" Sweeney croaks.

"What?" she cries out, bewildered. "Who? What're you on about? Mr. Todd, we really must get back home, you're obviously not well – "

He can no longer keep himself upright and pitches forward, body rigid and still, a once-mighty carotid of Athens toppling steadily and softly towards the earth, and only manages to catch himself by clutching Nellie's shoulders, dirtying the black silk and ivory skin with crude, earthen shades. He's heavier than her, so the force of his fall sends her reeling, flying backwards and sprawling into the mud, only just managing to prevent herself from landing on her back by throwing her hands from his shoulders and to the ground.

"_Mr. Todd!"_

It's a scream this time, a wild call to reach what she cannot hold, echoing and fading into the moonless night like another shooting, falling, dying star.

"_Goddammit, Sweeney, talk to me!"_

"Lucy." The word seeps from his mouth like sludge. "Lucy's grave. I can't find it and – "

And he's never thought to look until now.

Her eyes are as dark as the moonless sky; her eyes are as wide as the moon would be should it dare show its garish, jeering face at this hour.

"You ran out – in the fucking middle of the night – 'cause you wanted to find where Lucy's grave was?" she pants. Her dark moons wane into flaming crescents. "You couldn't have waited until morning for this? You couldn't have waited until it wouldn't be impossible to see three feet in front of you, you couldn't have waited to just ask me rather than tearing apart the cemetery – "

"She needs me," he whispers, broken, crumpling, knees sinking deeper into mud and fingers sinking deeper into her shoulders. It's she that he breathes for, she that his every action is dedicated to, and yet he has never visited her, never paid tribute to his reason and source of life. How could he have betrayed her for so long? She needs him to avenge her. But she also needs him to visit her – to validate, repent the pathetic life he gave her. "She needs me and – "

"_Lucy_," says Nellie, leaning up towards him, her words a deadly, animalistic snarl, "is _gone_. She needs nothing you can give her."

The instant she says it, she winces and cringes away from him, muscles balling with tension beneath his grip, preparing for a violent outlash – but it does not come.

He is still. He is numb.

_She is right._

He is losing control over his mind, his body, his breath, and he finds that the world is teetering, slipping away in slanting colors and breezing lights like ghosts slipping through mortal fingers – or perhaps the world is steady, anchored in place by the absent moon, and it is he that is slipping away –

Claws stab into the soft skin of his cheeks and catch him, reawaken him – and she stares into his eyes, tethering him to the world, letting the colors and lights slip away because she is keeping him steady, because she _is_ steady –

Then he's on his feet, a dancer glissading with graceless feet upon a sludge-covered earth – but her arms are around his chest, supporting, guiding, making sense of his feet's graceless movements, turning them into real maneuvers, or at least able to keep them from tumbling and collapsing beneath him completely . . .

"But – her grave . . ." he protests without any real weight to the syllables as they trudge through the night.

"She doesn't have one," Nellie snaps, not ceasing their walk, jerking him perhaps a little harder than necessary to keep him moving forward.

His mind balks, struggles to comprehend this, but then he realizes – of course not . . . she would not be buried in a church cemetery, not if Judge Turpin had anything to say about it – which he no doubt had – not she who had been violated and then committed suicide. It would not bode well for the judge's image. Certainly, then, she had been burned, cremated, her ashes thrown into the filthy river – or, fates having been merciful for once, cast into the heavens where they belonged . . .

A tinkling bell and a swing of a door – he's back home, her hands pushing him inside . . . but no, he does not truly have a home anymore – his source of life has no home, no place to rest, not even a pathetic stone in the ground, so how can he have a home? . . .

He's in the washroom now. There's the sound of water being decanted, and then his clothes are being peeled off, _slick_ing and _snick_ing against his skin as the soused fabric reluctantly strips away from skin, long fingers grazing his newly naked flesh.

He doesn't think to tell her that this is highly inappropriate, or that he can give himself a bath, or that she should bloody well leave him alone for once, because he isn't capable of thoughts anymore – or if he is, he doesn't comprehend what the thoughts mean. The world is a dense vacuum, and he doesn't comprehend anything but the warm fingers trailing across his skin like protective wildfire, shedding the drenched clothes from his form, burning and murdering and saving him all at once.

When he next becomes aware of reality, he's shivering and sitting submerged to his shoulders in water. Why is he shivering? The freezing clothes are gone, and the water is warm, and –

And her fingers are no longer on his skin.

This is what cold is. This is what hell is, this place of freezing heat. This place where his blood glaciates hot and solid in his veins, this place where nothing's real but his sluggishly churning mind. He sits and shivers and struggles to understand why he needs something he despises, something he would be far better off without – but of course, is this not the case with all humans? he fights to reason to himself. What we need is what is worst for us, what we need is what quietly destroys us . . .

Skin lights against skin, fingers light against forehead, and he shivers at the contact even though it sends a fresh blaze across his physique. She's returned, unsoiled clothes tucked under her arm, an ambiguity of twisted lips and drawn eyebrows on her face.

"You fool," she says, hand flying from his forehead and seizing his wrist, pulling him out of the bath, "you've caught yourself a fever. Well, I hope you're satisfied, I hope you're bloody well content with what you've gone and done . . ."

Her streaming words scratch gently at his ears, fuzzing around him in a temperate mist. Like a child, she towels him dry and dresses him in clean garments, then ushers him out and into her bedroom. Shoving him on her bed, she declares, "And don't you even think about sneaking upstairs to your room tonight. If you think I'm going to let you be up in that cold, drafty air all night with a temperature like what you've got – well, think again, love."

But she must realize he cannot think at all. She must realize that he can barely comprehend what is happening in this moment, nevermind think of the past or the future. He's drifting, floating, wandering, lulled by a river of incomprehension, of half-recalled shadows of bloodied beauty, and he grasps to see more than the shadows yet cannot see anything but, cannot envision anything more than the revenant of his wife's face, cannot even see her gravestone and affirm that this shadow he adores and loves and forgets really did breathe once –

"Drink it."

The command is accompanied by a tumbler being thrust into his grip. He blinks.

"I said drink it." She kneels down so they're on eye-level, face pinched with irritation. "Don't tell me you've gone deaf too."

Hardly knowing what he's doing, he brings the cup to his lips and lets the gin scald his tongue: at least this he can still feel.

A blanket is thrown over his shoulders, followed by another, and then another, until he is covered in layer upon layer of cottons and fleeces and wools, swaddled in a cocoon of hand-stitched affection.

As she stands behind him, smoothing the folds of the blankets, he hears a choked sniffling noise. It's an unusual enough sound to draw him from his vacuum and mutter, "Are you crying?"

"No," she says, a syllable flat and unfeeling and devoid of tears, and when she walks back around to face him, he can see that she isn't. He must have imagined the noise.

Frowning, she begins to fuss over him like a nanny, pressing down the blankets, stretching out his legs, coaxing him to lie down on the mattress. When he is arranged to her satisfaction, she lies down beside him, curling against his tightly blanketed body.

"G'night, Mr. T," she murmurs into his shoulder as her eyes close, twitching strangely beneath their lids as though suppressing some passion. "Sleep well."

But the gin has revitalized him, awoken the fragments of the soul into something that might pass for life's phantom. Freezing, shivering despite the swathe of blankets, he stares down at her prone form.

"You're still wearing your clothes, Mrs. Lovett," he says.

"I know that, love," she grouses without opening her eyes. "Please stop talking. It's bad enough you drew me out in the middle of the night with your shenanigans – I'd quite like to get at least a wink of sleep tonight – "

"Your clothes," he interrupts. "They're sopping and muddy."

All this time she had tended to him, she'd neglected herself . . .

"Bloody impossible, y'know that, don't you?" she replies with a drowsy air that seems far too forced. "Can hardly get you to mumble 'hello' some days, and now when I least want you chattering, you can't seem to find the will to shut your mouth – "

"_Nellie."_

The word hits the air like a fist upon glass, trembling, reverberating, shattering something irreversible.

Her eyes shoot open.

"Change out of your clothes," he says.

Now that her eyes are open, he sees they are as sodden as her attire. He hadn't been imagining her crying.

"Why?" she whispers.

Irritability scratches at his sides. "Isn't it self-explanatory, woman?" he growls. "Your clothes are filthy and wet. You'll become ill – or at the very least dirty your bed."

Her dark moons hang upon his face, suspended, round and dark and glistening – then she rolls onto her other side, facing away from him, and again he is within a moonless world.

He hears another choked sniffle.

"Are you crying?" he asks again, and this time she doesn't answer.

His muscles clench. The temptation to flee, to return to his own room as he always inevitably does on nights when he winds up tangled in her sheets, rises within him. And he knows that – despite her former warning not to leave – she would not be able to stop him, especially under the weight of tears she is not used to displaying.

Instead, he finds himself placing a hand upon her shoulder. Her body quails beneath his touch with muffled sobs.

"Why are you crying?" he questions softly.

Slowly, she turns over to face him, cheeks marked with damp avenues, lips trembling as they form into a smile. "'Cause you're never going to find what you're searching for, love. And it's time we both accepted that."

Enfolding her arms around his bundled, numb body, she nuzzles her face against his as a cat might, nose against nose. Her skin prickles against his, sends darts of warmth catapulting through his veins, darts hotter than his fever could ever hope to burn.

"But please don't go away looking again," she whispers against his lips.

Raising his hands from within the cocoon of blankets – fingers poised like talons to rip through dirt or grass or life itself if they have to, cold sweat oozing from his palms – he is again a demon rising from the pits of hell, searching for a salvation that he both craves and mocks.

Except this time, when his hands sink into her shoulders, clutching at muddied fabric and skin, it is not an accidental fall: it's an intentional act. She is still not why he is here, and he is still searching for what is not there, and –

_And she is still warm. And she is here._

He isn't going anywhere.

* * *

**A/N:** Reviews make my day. Seriously.


	7. Woman Delights Not Me

_Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. – William Shakespeare's __Hamlet_

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**A/N: **The wonderful authoress Pamena has graciously agreed to let me borrow her _Passing Strange_ universe for this one-shot. I'm going to assume that you've all read _Passing Strange_ considering that it's basically become a staple of the ST fandom. If, however, for some absurd reason you haven't read it, go do so immediately. Then immediately come back here and read this. ;]

Anyhow, this fic takes place sometime between chapters eighteen and nineteen of _Passing Strange_. Sweeney and Nellie are in an established relationship, but have yet to have their 'big moment.'

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**Disclaimer:** I do not own Sweeney Todd & co., _Passing Strange_, New York University, Michael Jackson, William Shakespeare, or Starbucks. My cassette collection does bear a striking resemblance to Nellie's, though. Yes, I do still own cassettes, and yes, I listen to them too.

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**Prompt #14:** radio-cassette player.

* * *

"'Ello, love!" Eleanor chirps when he shoves open their front door. She appears, beaming, radiant even within faded NYU sweats and without make-up, and presses a kiss to his cheek. Any other day, all this would fill him with a rush of appreciation and lust and reverence.

Not today.

Today it only increases his despair – for her presence further proves that he can never, ever, _ever_ escape his problem.

Sweeney grunts a reply, drags himself into the living room, and flops belly-down upon the sofa in a manner reminiscent of a caught fish giving its last gasp of breath.

"Bad day, dear?" says Eleanor, her cheerful, twittering words not impacted by his melancholy in the slightest. If he is the newly-dead fish, he ponders, then she must be the bird about to feast upon it.

Sweeney, face buried in the cushions, offers only another 'hmmmph.'

She shoves his legs to one side, then sinks down next to him on the couch. "Care to tell me about it?"

"No," he tells the sofa.

"Speak up, love," calls Eleanor happily from above as she fixes his legs to lay over her lap, "I don't 'ave the faintest idea what you're on about."

With a supreme effort, Sweeney rolls over onto his back and stares with a weighty misery that seems far too heavy for even a one-hundred-and-sixty-one-year-old man. Eleanor sobers when she catches sight of him.

"Good God, love," she says, wide-eyed, "whatever's the matter?"

He closes his eyes. "If you don't mind, Eleanor, I'd like to be left alone right now."

"As if I'd leave you alone like this," she says, arching an eyebrow.

"It's for the best, love. Trust me." She only accentuates the problem, after all, the problem that has plagued him all day. But he certainly can't _say_ so to her.

"Tell me what's wrong," she says firmly, giving no indication that she has plans to leave anytime soon.

Sweeney contorts his face into a grimace as he realizes he has to tell her. He can only articulate one single word through his pained lips:

"Females."

Eleanor blinks. Then she frowns. Then she twists the frown into a smile and then twists it back down and then blinks again.

"_What?"_ she at last exclaims.

Realizing that, despite how much it pains him to recall it, he will need to articulate further to get across his deep-rooted agony, Sweeney sighs, "There are too many of them."

She stares at him with uncomprehending incredulity, as though the dead fish has just sprung back to life, alive and well and tap-dancing to 'Singing in the Rain.'

"At NYU," he tries to explain, shifting his legs uncomfortably. "There are too many females."

Her mouth is thinning into a straight line and her skin is whitening and her eyes are narrowing: the incredulity is molding into anger. Sweeney swallows hard. He needs to explain faster.

"It just begins to wear on a man's nerves, after a point," he tells her.

It is then that her eyes turn into those belonging to a cat, her skin goes as white as the letters promulgating 'NYU' upon the campus' flags, and her lips press together so far that her mouth entirely disappears.

It is then that Sweeney Todd realizes he has made an incredible mistake.

Her lips reappear as they fall open and he winces as they let loose a tidal wave of assaults:

"There's too many females there, eh?" she asks him, though he doesn't think it would be wise to answer her. "Is that so? Are you aware that two 'undred years ago, women couldn't even_ get_ a college education? Well, and why would a woman ever want to fill her 'ead with silly mathematics or sciences or ideas? Why would she ever _need_ to? Of course, the women were never asked. Their men decided it for them."

"Eleanor – " Sweeney tries to interrupt. He doesn't know if living through all the years of the women's movement has made her so passionate about this subject, or if it would be in her nature to be like this no matter her immortal age. Either way, it's always been one of her hot buttons – and he should really know by now not to jam his finger upon it.

"But naturally," she rants on, "now that women're asserting the equality they justly deserve, men complain that they're being treated unequally. Now men're the ones attendin' college less that women, and they act as though women are to blame. Really? It's _our_ fault you're choosin' not to give yourselves educations?"

"Eleanor – " he attempts again.

"We're supposed to take pity on you who physically barred our access to education for centuries?" she cries, flinging his legs from her lap as she springs up to pace about the room. She's on her soapbox now and has absolutely no desire to dismount anytime soon. "You men can simply take control of your own lives – as we did a 'undred years ago – and take with ease what we 'ad to fight for. But no. You would rather whine about females takin' over your lives. You, Sweeney Todd, are a sexist pig – "

"I am _not_ sexist!" Sweeney yells, loud enough to distract Eleanor from her harangue and make her spin about to face him. That derogatory term is taking it one step too far.

She raises an eyebrow and places her hands on her hips. "Keep talkin', love."

"Sometimes, it's just – exhausting," he says, picking and choosing his words as gingerly as an elderly woman picks and chooses her fruits at the market, "interacting with so many women on a daily basis. You would find it so too," he adds quickly when she snaps open her mouth to restart her spiel. "You couldn't stomach more than a few hours with those sixties feminists before needing to run home by yourself and put on your bra again."

Crimson blood rushes to her cheeks, replacing the furious white blanch and rather nullifying the impact of her anger. "Who – I never – 'ow'd you learn about that?" she demands to know. "I never wrote to you sayin' those things!"

Sweeney smirks. "It's called reading between the lines, pet."

"Nevermind," says Eleanor, trying to recover both her lost dignity and her rage by thrusting her chin into the air and pretending there is no blush upon her face. "We're talkin' about you right now, not me, and – "

"Sixty-five to thirty-five, Eleanor."

"What?"

"That's the ratio of females to males at NYU. Sixty-five percent to thirty-five percent."

Despite herself, Eleanor cannot stop from wincing. "That's pretty bad," she admits.

"Perhaps you can understand my pain a bit better, then."

Relenting, she returns to the sofa and places his lounging legs in her lap again. He doesn't particularly desire her company at this moment. Not because he doesn't desire her on the _whole_, but simply because, well, she _is_ a _s_he, and that's not precisely what he's searching for at this moment. Nonetheless, he swings himself around so that his head is in her lap rather than his feet. It's better to be in Eleanor Lovett's favor than out, after all, and he's treaded on rocky ground enough with her today.

He peers up at her with the forlorn, drooping eyes that Louie has when he is trying to win back her favor. The results do not disappoint: Eleanor sighs, tuts her tongue, and begins to smooth his hair back from his forehead.

"Tell me all about it, love," she says.

Sweeney heaves his own sigh and closes his eyes as he begins to recount his devastating tale . . .

xxx

It begins like any other day: a quick romp amidst her bed sheets, a hasty shower and dressing, a bagel and coffee cup to go, and Sweeney Todd is out the door and on his way to work. Everyone around him is making the same harried commute: even as they walk the sidewalks, some are still shoving arms into suit jackets, chomping a doughnut with one hand while texting urgent messages with the other, or flipping through the office paperwork they neglected to read the night before.

But not even the throbbing stress level of those around him can take away that rush he feels every morning when he first sees Washington Square Park.

Sweeney has never been particularly attached to any of his jobs over the past nearly-two-hundred years. He can't say he's particularly attached to this one either, but that doesn't stop the surge of feeling. Maybe it's the bustle of activity, maybe it's the swarm of mingled intellectual chatter and amiable gossip, maybe it's the fact that Starbucks' coffee is without question the best in the world – but there's something about this place that floods him with energy every morning. With a rare curve of his lips that might almost be a smile, he swings open the doors to his building, flashes the security guard his identity badge, and makes his way towards his classroom.

"Pssst. Professor Todd!"

He stops walking and whirls around at the sound of the harsh whisper. Brittany Kyles, one of his students, peers at him from behind the ajar door to the girls' restroom, motioning him towards her. The door is barely open at all, so all he can see is half of her face, a sliver of a body, and the frantically gesturing fingers.

Sweeney blanches. "Miss Kyles," he says, matching her harsh whispered tone, "I'm not going to join you in the ladies' room. I'm your teacher. It'd be highly inappropriate, and just nevermind my gender – "

"It's an _emergency_, Mr. Todd," Brittany beseeches him, the one eye visible to him going wide. "Believe me, I wouldn't ask if it wasn't."

His teacher instincts awaken at the word 'emergency.' Is it not his ethical responsibility to help these children in true instances of need, after all?

Sweeney moves towards the wall to get out of the line of traffic, but does not go further than that. There are some lines that simply cannot be crossed no matter how desperate the times are, and being in the ladies' room with a female pupil is one of them.

"What happened?" he murmurs to her, leaning against the wall and pretending to casually observe the passing students rather than conspicuously conversing with a girl behind the ladies' room door.

Brittany takes a deep, rattling breath. "Mr. Todd," she says, "I need you to tell me if this skirt makes me look fat."

The concept of appearing inconspicuous entirely forgotten in utter bamboozlement, Sweeney's head jerks to the side. He stares at her as though she's asking about growing a second head rather than wearing a skirt.

"As I said, I normally wouldn't ask this of you," says Brittany, the one visible eye large and pleading. "But my best friend is sick, and on the way to class this morning I thought I noticed some people looking at me very strangely – but I don't know if that's because of the skirt or something else. Which is why I need a second opinion. Desperately."

"Miss Kyles," says Sweeney with as much delicacy as he can, "I don't think I'm really the right person – "

"No, please! You're far from my first choice, but you're absolutely the only person I can ask!" When Brittany realizes that this is hardly a compliment, the tiny slice of her face peering between the crack of the door goes pink. "It's just that," she tries to amend, "you're always so honest and candid with us students in the classroom, so I knew I could count on you to be just as honest and candid with me here, outside of it . . ."

"Nonetheless," says Sweeney, glancing over his shoulder and then back at the woebegone girl, "I'm far from an expert on – "

Before he knows what's happening, he's been yanked inside the women's restroom.

"_Miss Kyles!"_ he thunders and she immediately lets go of his wrist as though burned.

"Just please look, please!" cries Brittany, bending her elbows towards her chest and flapping her hands, looking very much like a dying tyrannosaurus rex. "I have to know before I go to class – I can't go through the whole day looking fat – if I do look fat in this skirt, I mean, and – "

The sight of her standing there, flapping away and nearly in tears, is so pathetic that the tiny piece of Sweeney Todd still in possession of a conscious feels compelled to mutter, "You don't look fat."

She squints at him through her tears and fiddles with the edges of the skirt. "Really? You're telling the truth?"

"Yes," says Sweeney. And it is the truth. He doubts very much that Brittany Kyles could ever look fat, really, considering her legs hardly rival toothpicks in terms of breadth.

Brittany blows out a relieved sigh through her lips, then she grins and begins to thank him earnestly, grasping his hands and wringing them again and again and again.

Sweeney does not have time for this. Class begins in ten minutes, and any minute – no, any second, any moment, any one one-hundredth of a heartbeat – another female could walk into the restroom and see them!

Disentangling himself from the girl, he pushes out of the bathroom door faster than lightning and marches onward to his classroom, breathing his own sigh of relief. He's free, and the day can continue on as normal.

No sooner has his entered his classroom, however, than he notices Rebecca Pushman – a normally very expressive and lively girl – sitting at a desk in the far corner of the room, her arms folded on her desk and her head resting atop them, sobbing her heart out.

His short-lived triumph and joy dissipating, Sweeney comes to a stop in the doorway. He doesn't want to help this child. These college students may consider themselves adults – and they may be legally entitled to call themselves so – but emotionally, they've hardly passed five years old, and he always goes to any length possible to avoid the continual soap operas they create for themselves.

As he makes for his desk, however, he feels a nagging guilt, Rebecca's bawling resounding in his ears. He's her teacher. He should at least make an effort to comfort her before class begins. Steeling himself, Sweeney starts for the back of the room.

"Miss Pushman?" he asks, seating himself atop the desk in front of her. "Are you alright?"

She jerks her head up and glares at him through red-rimmed eyes. "Do I look alright?" she barks.

Sweeney scowls right back. "Excuse me for being concerned with the well-being of my students," he returns coolly. "If I'm not wanted, then, I'll return to my desk. But I except the obscenely loud snuffling to have stopped by the time today's lesson begins. If not, I'll have to request that you leave so as not to disturb my other students – "

"_Fine!"_ she screams at him, springing up from her desk so fast that Sweeney doubles back in shock, nearly falling from the desk he's perched upon. "Fine! I'll leave, if it'll make you happy!"

Rebecca swings her book bag onto her shoulder with one violent snap of her wrist, nearly whacking him on the knees with it, then begins to stride towards the door. Sweeney, bewildered into silence, stays mute.

"See?" she yells over her shoulder. "I'm leaving! I'm leaving your class! I hope it makes you happy! I hope it makes you all happy – all of you!" They're the only ones in the room, but Sweeney doesn't correct her on this point. "Are you happy? Why aren't you smiling, then, hmm? Well, you can smile after I've left – just go ahead and smile all day long!"

And with that, she throws open the door and exits, and a throbbing migraine enters in her wake. Sweeney groans and sinks into his desk chair, wincing, as he readies himself for the day's lecture.

Once all his pupils are assembled, he begins to speak. What with the pounding behind his eyes, however, he finds it hard to pay attention to what he's saying.

Because everywhere he looks, he sees women.

It is like this every day, of course, the female-male ratio being what it is. But for some reason, today, he notices it far more than he usually does. And he doesn't like it.

The pain behind his eye throbs ever harder and he grits his teeth to prevent from crying out.

_Women._ _Everywhere._

The studious women with their crisp shirts and bulging book bags; the flirtatious women with their moony expressions and pencils twirling in curls; the athletic women with their broad shoulders and water bottles; the artistic women with their tight-fitting pants and black nail polish; the half-sleeping women with their mused hair and faces slumped in hands; it goes on and on. . . .

Males are present, to be sure, but they dot the room without certainty or prominence, as wary as they are eager of the current female-heavy circumstances. Where have all the men gone?

Sweeney Todd has stumbled into a place where ovaries outnumber testicles and he feels his manliness being drained with each passing second.

After the lecture is over is even worse. There is soon a queue of girls in front of his desk, bursting at the seams with everything from legitimate questions to coy gestures to unfinished homework excuses. His eyes blur, his mind numbs, and after twenty-seven minutes of this, it's a miracle that he doesn't just tell them all to high-tail it out of there.

Their presence lingers even after all the students have fled the classroom. It lingers in the redolence of Chanel and Victoria's Secret; in the stench of twenty brands of hair spray and fifty varieties of lip stick still attacking his nostrils; in the high-pitched, feminine voices still thickening the silent air; in the images burned upon his retinas. Colorful purses, tosses of hair, glossy pink-lipped smiles.

_Everywhere._

Sweeney scrubs his hands over his eyes. What is the matter with him? The number of females has not lessened or increased since yesterday. Perhaps he just needs to visit Starbucks before his next class. Yes. A grande no-whip white mocha seems just what is needed right now.

On second thought, perhaps a vente.

With an extra shot.

It is as he enters the hallway to follow through with this excellent idea that Sweeney receives, as it were, the straw that broke the ex-demon-barber's back:

"Professor Todd?" says Sadie Reyner, an older student of his in a low, confidential voice as she falls into step beside him.

He has to tense his muscles to stop himself from recoiling at yet another woman. "Yes, Miss Reyner?"

Reyner averts her eyes as they near the glass doors leading outside, wincing a little. "You may want to – check yourself – before you exit." With that, she dives out the door.

Sweeney, bewildered, halts in his tracks and stares at her retreating form. Then he looks himself up and down. When this yields no results, he sets his jaw and begins a security pat-down of himself, feelings of irritation and humiliation growing with every passing second. If this is a prank, that girl – though normally one that he does not mind too much, being of the diligent and quiet sort – is going to have hell to pay tomorrow –

Then, for the first time in a hundred and sixty-one years, Sweeney Todd turns redder than a tomato:

An unwrapped, feminine sanitary napkin is stuck to the sole of his shoe.

xxx

"And then I snapped," concludes Sweeney mournfully. "The rest of the day was pure torture."

He dares an upward glance at Eleanor and winces at the unconcealed scorn that he finds there.

"And all this is s'posed to make me feel sorry for you?" she asks dryly.

"Well . . . yes," says Sweeney.

She hasn't stopped petting his hair, at least, which he takes as a good sign. From the way her pace has increased though, she seems to be contemplating ripping it right out of his skull.

"It's embarrassing having – _that _stuck to your foot. Add that to the sheer number of females at the school, and all the talking and flirting – "

"They're flirtin' with you again?" she says sharply.

"Not much," he corrects himself, realizing his mistake, "just typical female student behavior, you know – but couple all that with the scene with Reyner and the – the thing – on my shoe – "

"Just be thankful you didn't make it outside," says Eleanor without pity.

" – and why on Earth was it unwrapped on the floor of my classroom?"

"And be thankful it wasn't a condom," she adds thoughtfully.

Sweeney glares at her. "If you insist on keeping me company, the least you could do is be a bit sympathetic to my loss of manly dignity."

For a second, her expression is completely still, and he fears he's gone too far – but then she throws back her head and laughs. "Sorry, love. Didn't know sympathy was what you was desirin'." She purses her lips, then springs up from the couch, jostling his langoring pose. "Be right back," she calls over her shoulder as she disappears down the hall.

When she returns, she resumes her place on the sofa, fixing his head in her lap and placing a Walkman on his chest.

"This should 'elp you reassert your coveted manliness," she says, rolling her eyes.

"You still have a Walkman?" says Sweeney as she slides the headphones over his ears.

"Yes."

"You still have _cassettes_? In the twenty-first century?"

"Obviously, yes," she says tartly. "Why're you so surprised? You've seen my record collection and they're even older. Now hush up."

He does so just as she jabs the play button and a screeching "WAH!" tears at his eardrums, followed by the beginning chords of 'Smooth Criminal.' He cringes.

"Michael Jackson?" he questions with a sneer after turning down the volume. "This is how you expect me to 'reassert my manliness'?"

"What's wrong with Michael Jackson?" she snaps. "Anyway, it was this or a Broadway musical – all my other cassettes melted in the back of my old Chevy – and I know you'd take Michael over Patti any day."

He's still cringing, but he has to concede this point. Besides, successful relationships are all about gives-and-takes, aren't they?

"Thank you," he gives her grudgingly.

And he takes away a kiss to his temple in return.

Being surrounded by women isn't _always_ a bad thing.

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**A/N: **Reviews are love. =)


	8. Two Pulses

**A/N:** 30 Kisses, prompt seventeen, kilohertz; fanfic50, prompt forty-six, pulse.

* * *

After their first coupling, Nellie springs up from the bed before he does.

Their clothes are outcasted on the floor like children's discarded candy wrappers; she paces wildly as she grabs the articles belonging to her. Sweeney watches, supine and apathetic, from her mattress.

She spent so long wishing for this moment. She spent so long wishing for him to notice her and sweep her off the feet like those pathetic-but-so-damn-_happy_-princesses in the fairy tales. She spent so long wishing that, now that it's come to fruition, she's scared of the reality. Of the ever after to this tale.

Because she knows deep down their story cannot end well.

Because any moment he'll leap up in disgust and scream with his silent dark eyes that he's angry, that he's hurt, that she's nothing but a whore, and those screaming dark eyes will be worse than anything he could scream through his mouth.

Because their two pulses will never beat as one and she needs to stop torturing herself with the possibility that they ever could.

She throws on her clothes as hastily as he threw them off just minutes before, fighting with a mess of buttons and laces as she stumbles towards the door, needing to leave before he does.

"Nellie."

She freezes.

She hears him approach from behind. Her muscles have chilled to ice blocks and she can't coax them into melting before he reaches her – she tries to urge the ice in her body to heat – because she needs to move away before he reaches her, before she can see the disgusted hatred burning in the furnaces of his eyes –

His chest, covered only in sweat rather than cloth, presses against her equally damp and undressed back, thawing her muscles in an instant.

His arms thread around her waist and pull her closer against him. His chest rises and falls against her back, swelling into her flesh with every breath. His head nestles in the crook of her shoulder, hair tickling her jawline. His lips forge a necklace of soundless kisses along the back of her neck. His hands trace along her body, fingers playing leisurely over her stomach, her chest, her face, melding her liquid form to his own.

She closes her eyes and lets herself be consumed in his fire.

"I thought I should leave . . ." she manages to whisper, head lolling backwards against his shoulder. Her eyes crack open tentatively to find his gazing down at her, piercing her like swords crafted from volcanic rock, black and solid and glinting with light from some mysterious source. "I didn't think it'd be wise for me to linger – to overstay my welcome, or to make this into something that it couldn't ever – I thought you'd become angry if you thought too long about all this, and I didn't want to . . ."

Never one for words, he doesn't reply.

Never one for silence, she keeps talking:

"Don't get me wrong, love, I've got no regrets about – this – but I thought you would and – and I couldn't bear to see that, I couldn't stomach seeing you enraged after what I'd waited to happen for so many months . . ."

_So many years . . . _

"So I thought I should just get going before you came fully back to your senses and yelled or stormed off or . . ."

_Or glared at me with all the anger and pain and betrayal of the world . . ._

Eyes never flickering from hers, he traces one palm back down her face, her chest, her stomach, until he finds her fingers. Grasping them in his own, he drags their entwined grips upward. Then he presses their wrists together, encircling both their joints with the fingers from his other hand, holding them together.

They are still for a long moment, back to chest, wrist to wrist, eye to eye. She wishes he would just tell her what he means rather than expecting her to interpret his language consisting entirely of gestures and eyes. She grows weary of being his translator.

Then she gasps – because finally she understands. She stares at their wrists with wonder and joy and love and the renewed seedlings of hope that perhaps – _perhaps_ – she shouldn't be scared of their ever after:

Their two pulses beat as one.

* * *

**A/N:** Yes, I know it's improbably fluffy. I need a little fluff in my life right now. Hopefully you guys do too, haha.

As always, reviews are love.


	9. Black and Bitter

**A/N:** Written for a Dirty Dozen Friday at The Write Prompts blog, in which you must write a story containing all twelve listed words within fifteen minutes. This ended up pretty rambling, but hopefully you will still enjoy. I'd love to hear your thoughts even if you don't.

For 30 Kisses, prompt twenty-one: violence, pillage/plunder, extortion.

* * *

She never adds any sort of sweetener to her tea. No sugar, no honey. Not even any milk. The same is true for her coffee. Black and bitter. That's all she wants to taste. Pure.

One day, she wants to travel to Paris. She doesn't want to live there. She just wants to visit. Her grandmother had promised to take her there one day, when they had a bit of money and she could pass for a proper lady. Her grandmother spoke of towering fixtures and Gothic architecture, of a thousand clerestory windows and two thousand lights within each. Her grandmother spoke of drinks unsweetened by artificial tastes: in Paris, they downed straight tea and black coffee and hard reality in one swallow, without a single pucker of the lips.

Her mother had chided her grandmother for putting these dreams into Nellie's head. Her mother believed in practicality, in not dwelling on what could not be helped. Nellie believes in these things too, but she also believes – knows – that without belief in the unbelievable, she wouldn't be able to waltz through her day-to-day routine.

She traces her finger along the rim of her porcelain bowl and smiles faintly at it. It's a new bowl, far more beautiful than her old one – but there is a little frog painted within the depths of the bowl, and she doesn't understand why.

'_Cause he reminded me of you, mum,_ said Toby with a laugh when she asked him why he'd chosen this particular bowl after she'd sent him out for a new one.

She peers down at the frog, positioned within the depths of the bowl: emerald glaze for a body and black dots for eyes, limbs spread in a great leap to nowhere.

She can't figure out if Toby meant to compliment her or not.

Frogs make her think of Paris. After her mother had chided her grandmother for planting the idea that Nellie could ever rise high enough to become a lady, Nellie – too young to have learned yet only to cry when her pillow was her single companion – had sunk into the old armchair in the far corner of the parlor, sniffling and weeping.

Nellie's mother may have been practical, but she was not cold: she joined Nellie in the armchair, squishing into its narrow seat and wrapping her arms around her daughter. She spoke soothingly of how silly a place Paris was anyway, of how the people there spent most of their time dallying on streets or ten-hour-long meals, how they were more interested in sitting around and talking about ideas rather than implementing any of them. The real ladies of Paris did not deserve admiration. The real ladies of Paris were silly nits and useless bores. Nellie Marrell was neither; Nellie Marrell did not sit and talk, she moved and talked, she put her ideas into action: therefore, Nellie Marrell, by no means a lady, was far superior to these Parisian folk.

Besides, her mother added, wiping away the last of Nellie's tears as Nellie presented her with a quavering but true grin, they dined upon frog legs. Disgusting.

Nellie's tears dried, her spirit lifted, and she decided that her mother was right and the aristocratic ladies of Paris were frivolous creatures who paled in comparison to her.

Nonetheless, she still drinks without sweeteners.

When she drifts up the stairs to share her afternoon coffee with him – it isn't something she often drinks, but she greatly enjoys the occasions she does – he puckers his lips after his first sip.

"It's black," he says, stretching out his arm to set the cup on his dresser, glaring out the window all the while. He doesn't even have the decency to glance into her eyes when criticizing her coffee.

Her cheeks and neck prickle in the beginnings of an angry flush. "Y'don't like black coffee, Mr. T?"

He jerks his head: _no_.

The crimson blood presses closer to the surface of her skin. She doesn't know why she's so angry – Sweeney rarely looks at her, even more rarely speaks to her, and even more rarely actually likes anything – but she doesn't care for the why just now.

"Black coffee's too bitter for you, hmm?" she demands. "It's too bitter for you to swallow without diluting it with sugar or milk? It's too hard for you to swallow reality?"

He swings his head sideways and locks his gaze with hers. "I never said I dilute my coffee with sugar or milk, pet."

Suddenly she's flushing with embarrassment rather than anger. She swallows. "I know, love. I know – and I'm sorry."

She moves towards him and straightens his vest with a compulsive, absent gesture of her fingers. She then reaches around him for his nearly full mug of coffee, to take both mugs downstairs in a gesture of apology and shame, but his hand closes around hers before she can do so.

She looks up into his face. His eyes are already on her again – or maybe they never left – and his expression is strange, new. Respect, or something like it, reflects tentatively in the twist of his lips and the half-sucked in cheeks.

"Do you drink your coffee black, Mrs. Lovett?" he asks.

She frowns up at him, but not from sadness. "Yes, love. Always."

The hand grasped around hers jerks forward as his other hand twitches. For one wild moment, she thinks he's going to break into applause. But she does not deserve applause, and Sweeney Todd knows she does not deserve applause just as well as she does.

Instead, he's sweeping her into a waltz across the barber shop, his hands tight on her waist and her fingers. The coffee makes her steps more frantic and jittery than usual, but he matches her pace for pace even though he's drank none, meeting her every caffeinated footfall.

She doesn't want to question why he chose to abruptly swing her around in a dance, nor does she need to. It is enough that he did. This is enough. This is heaven, they two demons spiraling together within the world's great black pit, and she will never let go.

"What're you thinking, love?" she asks through a haze of whirling feet and glittering eyes, resting her head against his shoulder, nuzzling his neck with her nose.

He plays his fingers along her waist, runs a hand through her untamed locks, says nothing.

"Oh, c'mon now, Mr. Todd. You may not speak much, but you sure as hell think a lot – well, y'know, come to think of it, I'm not too sure about hell . . . 's'probably not the best saying for me of all people to be using, 'sure as hell,' I s'pose I should find a new – "

Noticing that his eyes are laughing down at her, she smacks his shoulder. "Aww, bugger it – just tell me what's going through your head, Mr. Todd."

He chuckles. "Just that you would have hated Paris."

"But everyone in Paris takes their coffee black," says Nellie, frowning. "They enjoy it that way. They swallow their tea and coffee just as they come naturally."

"Yes," Sweeney agrees with another chuckle, still amused by her outburst, "but not when they are alone and no longer masking."

The laughter dies on his lips and in his eyes as she looks up at him, silent, brow drawn and fingers tight, examining, inquiring, yearning. Their feet are still capering but without form or direction, feet and muscles sagging, bodies spinning about the room in abandonment. The moment hangs pregnant but she doesn't know what it is pregnant with; something is happening but she doesn't know what, can't know what, and the unknown and the unplanned terrify her because without her control she is nothing, yet in this moment she is not afraid –

If she lifts her head, or if he lowers his, or if they meet halfway – she doesn't know this either.

When their lips touch, it doesn't matter.

He plunders her mouth with his own, searching, scouring, and she meets him, matches his grasping lips as he matched her romping feet, extortion for extortion. He tastes like the minute sip of coffee he downed just minutes ago and loathed; she pillages deeper, desperate for every drop. Her hands bury in his hair and his clench around her waist –

And then he pulls away, but she hasn't drunk and plundered and taken her fill yet; she reaches out for him, blindly, gluttonously, as he bats her hands away and returns to his window, no longer looking at her.

Her body sags. Her hands drop against her skirts. Her eyes sting.

"What?" she whispers without expecting an answer. "What?"

His lips spasm, the corners stretching out in a wild twitch as the centers flex then contract, and she realizes he's trying to smile and not cry.

"I lied, pet," he whispers to the window. "I do need milk to dilute the taste."

She tries to draw him again into her arms, recapture his attention and his respect and his desperate pillages, willingly surrendering whatever he'll take from her.

He wants nothing she can give him.

Heart fisting around itself, she places a last kiss to his jawline, then drags herself down the stairs and back to her shop. She licks her lips as she descends to taste the spoils she thieved from him: sweat, coffee, and memories, black and bitter.

And pure.


	10. Sestina

**A/N:** I am not a poet. So when my Language Arts teacher assigned my class to write a sestina, suffice to say I was not a happy camper. After two extremely disastrous excuses for poems, I came up with one mildly disastrous one . . . one in which I had allowed myself to secretly write about my favorite barber and baker.

Anyway, as I've said, poetry isn't really my forte, but since I don't absolutely abhor this, and since it's been far too long since I've updated, I thought I'd share it with you guys. I hope you find it tolerable. ;]

* * *

Prompt nineteen: red.

* * *

He paces

across the room like a caged tiger,

muscles coiled, volatile, ready. As he prowls he looks out his window

and sees her red

hair flying as she moves around outside, tresses liberated from their bun, curls caught in a dance.

One lock dangles between her eyes to press upon her forehead a kiss.

x

An hour later finds he and she in the same room. She reaches out to rest a kiss

upon his lips but he paces

away. They stand in opposite corners, a silent and still dance.

She tries to call him back to her and the hairs on his neck bristle like an angry tiger.

She stands where the sunlight from the glass panes cannot reach. Her red

hair looks muddy in the shadows. He returns to his window.

x

He looks out his window

and does not look at her. Her kiss

falls into the air, then she leaves him be. Her errant red

hair paces

across the back of her neck as she exits and he growls like a tiger

to himself: In solitude, he cannot dance.

x

To desire and fear all at once only seems strange to those who do not know how. To dance

with what all at once destroys you and keeps you alive is endless warfare. Through the window

he does not see her and he digs his fingers into the wall and claws like a tiger

at the wood. Her kiss

of spices and smoke and love floats, unclaimed, in the air, and he paces

through the room as his vision blurs with dots of red.

x

Elsewhere in the home, her red

locks twist and escape from their bun. Her curls dance

as she paces

through the home, cleaning, cooking, wiping, sweeping, doing, being, breathing, anything to avoid his window

and his eyes and his kiss

that he will not take. She refuses to stop a moment for rest and respite as would a tiger.

x

He feasts his eyes upon what lies outside, like a tiger

would feast its eyes upon its prey, yet his carcass is a bare skeleton. He growls and sees red

curls kiss

a waiting canvass of skin, yet it is all in his mind. He refuses to dance

but he despises to be still, looking out the window

when there is nothing to see, if ever there was anything to see. He rips his hands from the wall and away he paces.

x

He prowls into her room like a caged tiger and she stops all her movement. The dance

of her red curls across the back of her neck and her forehead ends. He crosses to her. His window

lies far behind him. He rests upon her lips a kiss, then paces away.

* * *

**A/N:** Reviews are love.


	11. Sobriety

**A/N:** I've sat on this one for about eight months now, as I worried about its level of fluffiness. But, as I've seen in the past, sometimes a little fluff is what we all need.

So I hope you enjoy this little fic. I also hope you review whether you enjoy it or not.

* * *

For 30 Kisses #5: Hey, You Know . . .; fanfic50 #11: Drunk.

* * *

"Today is Lucy and mine's twentieth anniversary."

"I know, love," says Nellie, grinding her teeth together.

She also knows that he's on his seventh glass of gin and he normally takes no more than four in a single night. But she keeps quiet on this point.

"Roses," says Sweeney, staring into his tumbler. "A dozen of them. That's what I bought for her the last time we were together for this day." His fingers quake as he brushes a droplet of gin from the table, rubbing the liquid into his skin. "All ashes now. Gone."

_You've got me, love. Please know that you've got me. Please have me._

"She lives on in your memories, darling," says Nellie, catching his fingers within her own and giving them a gentle squeeze, despite the fact that her teeth are clenching even tighter and her heart is being mangled beyond repair. "Those'll never die."

His eyes remain lost in his gin glass, but his fingers hold hers too tight. "It's not the same. _She's_ not the same. She was so beautiful . . ."

And the she currently at his table is incredibly tired of these conversations. Nellie knows he's hurting – but goddammit, so is she. She can't do this anymore. She shoots into a standing position.

"Well, it's off to bed for me, Mr. Todd."

Her hand is still fisted inside his, sticky with gin and warm with life. His other hand tips his glass to his lips. "It's only just past ten."

"And I'm all tuckered out," she replies. "Had a long day down here, love. Keep chatting 'bout your beautiful wife if you like, but you're going to have to chat to the empty air."

The sarcastic words flee her lips before she can stop them. Her hand flies to her mouth: to speak callously of Lucy is to sign your own death sentence.

Sweeney, however, is perhaps even more inebriated than she originally guessed, for he only furrows his brow at his tumbler in a gently thoughtful manner. "You know, Mrs. Lovett . . ." His voice dies away.

"Yes?" she prompts him, patience diluting.

He bestows an expression that she's never seen before upon his gin glass – a curve of the lips unable to be called a frown or a smile, a curve of pain and sorrow and pure love – an expression he'll never bestow upon her. "She was very beautiful . . . so beautiful . . ."

Anger stabs at her gut. "G'night, Mr. Todd."

She takes a step away from the kitchen, yanking her hand from his grip as she departs – yet suddenly she finds herself back in her chair, blinking at Sweeney, whose face is now very close to hers, his fingers locked around her own. His eyes are trained on hers rather than his gin; they siphon away her fury as easily as the desert sun siphons away a hint of water; they leave her with no rage, no emotion, no thought. No nothing but to sit and stare.

"You know, Mrs. Lovett," he says again, though this time it's a whisper, pressing his thumb into her palm as though to affirm she is made of the same flesh as he. "You are also beautiful."

_Liar._

The word pricks at her dam against emotions and cracks it open just enough for her to snort and shake her head. Their noses nearly touch. "You're just saying that 'cause you don't want me to shove you out of my bed tonight."

"No," he says, so quiet it's no more than a breath and no less than a promise, "I'm not."

She snorts again but can't bring herself to break their joined gaze. "Then you're just saying that 'cause – "

His lips slide upon hers, inhaling the rest of her words and silencing them to the world's ears. He brings one hand around to the base of her skull to pull her closer. Reality fizzles away and she no longer is aware of anything outside of his touch, his warmth, his taste – or maybe he is all that reality consists of.

His is not an unfamiliar touch, but it's one that never fails to strip her away layer by layer until all that's left of her is the barest of nothings. Even though it's a different touch than normal – fumbling and a little messy, control and certainty swept away with the alcohol – it's still beautiful and it's still him and it's still everything she'll ever need.

He pulls away enough to breathe her in and lets his lips wander along her face, trailing up the curve of her nose, around the bend of her hairline, down the border of her jaw.

"Then you're just saying that 'cause you're drunk," she finishes belatedly, eyes still closed.

His mouth pauses its search of her skin to rest against her right temple. He whispers, "That doesn't mean it's not me, pet."


	12. Every Man's Wish

30 Kisses #12: in a good mood; fanfic50 #39: design.

* * *

_Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men._

_Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. – Zora Neale Hurston_

xxx

She painted the world as she saw it and the images never failed to scare him. Maybe he should cut out her eyes.

It wasn't as though she didn't see the cruelty that dwelt within humans. That he could have understood; naivety was something that Benjamin Barker had known quite intimately. What terrified him was the fact that she _did_ see the cruelty – and she didn't care. She recognized that there existed in the world faceless hatred, pain that tore deeper than a human's innards, vicious lust burning like whiskey in the veins of men . . . but she went on babbling and singing and bustling and scrubbing and laughing as though it did not matter. As though she could still live upon a dead Earth.

"They're going to crush you," he told her once, her head upon his heart and her curls tendriling across his chest, sprawled across his bed in a moment of inactivity. He liked seeing her inactive, slumped without purpose; he liked seeing her pushed into immobility, crushed beneath the weight of the harsh reality she typically ignored and forced to suffocate, surrender. He refused to see that a willing surrender was not a surrender at all, that she could not be pushed down by the world, that her purpose was far from gone – her purpose's heart was beating in her ear.

"Who's that, love?" she asked. "Which 'they' are you on about?"

"The world. Its people."

"D'you think so?" Eleanor queried lightly, arching her neck back with a cat-like gesture to place a kiss on the underside of his jaw. "Now why's that?"

"They have to crush you." He twined his fingers in her hair, holding the back of her skull in his palm. "They can't stand seeing you survive."

Her fingers rippled across his chest, tracing the scars of his past with her nails. "Are we still talking about 'they'? Or are we talking about you?"

He watched her fingers move across his chest and along the lines of his scars – not trying to redesign them, merely imprinting them to her memory. His stomach burned: How did she manage to create her own reality while still acknowledging what truly existed so easily? How could she dream with foggy eyes of seaside cottages and glittering waves while still being able to clear that fog from her gaze enough to see as she chopped up mens' bodies to bloodied bits, chatted amiably to her revolting customers, traced her nails over gruesome scars? How could she bear to see things as they were while simultaneously seeing how they could be?

"You can't crush me, love," she teased, nipping his neck. "You've got to have _someone_ around to cook your meals and make sure you don't wander outside with your shirt on backwards, or some suchlike."

"That was one time, Eleanor," he growled, annoyed at how she always managed to divert so easily from the subject at hand, but her words gave him pause. Of course she was wrong – of course he could crush her at a moment's notice – and he gripped her head tighter in his hand, fingertips pushing into her skull, as a reminder to both of them . . .

But did he want to crush her? Did he want to see her fold beneath the weight of man's gnarling brutality, just as he had folded, just as everyone in the world either folded or became a part of it – or did he want to see her become the exception and continue to stand with her chin aloft, her eyes still intact in her skull?

She rolled over in his arms to press her chest to his and look into his eyes, curls tendriling into his face and making his skin itch; his hand remained at her skull, but absent of its former pressure. "I won't be crushed, love," she reassured him, quietly, tone level, the mirthful lilt gone from her voice. "I've got to allow them to crush me before they ever can – and I'll never allow that."

He pressed his fingers into her skull, urging her head to return to rest upon his heart so that he could not look into her face, and wished that he could believe her.


	13. Maddened By The Stars

30 Kisses #28: Wada Calcium CD3; fanfic50 #24: science.

**A/N:** For those who don't know - because I sure didn't - Wada Calcium CD3 is some sort of calcium supplement sold in Japan, marketed heavily to kids, elderly folk, and people who have sunlight or fish deficiencies. Save for sending Sweeney and Nellie on a crazy time-traveling adventure and then subsequently on a field trip to Japan, I could not figure out any way to incorporate this supplement into one of my stories. So the actual Wada Calcium makes no appearance in this fic. That said . . . well, it's always fairly sun-less in London due to either rain or night, and this fic takes place in the dark. Also, Sweeney and Nellie are sunlight deficient. Obviously. xD So there's my rationalization. I hope you enjoy.

* * *

Every night, at precisely one in the morning, he takes a candle to his window and flashes it to the sky, to nothing, to the heavens, to everything that refuses to listen and everything he refuses to believe in:

_Dot dash dot dot, dot dot dash, dash dot dash dot, dash dot dash dash. _

_L-U-C-Y._

Every night, at precisely one in the morning, she stops in the middle of whatever she's doing – wiping down tables, tabulating the week's earnings, butchering mens' bodies – and runs to her shop to squish her forehead against the window and peer up at him and his window and his unheeded message.

Who does he honestly expect to see the signal? And even if anyone does see, who does he honestly expect to respond? The one person that it's meant for is dead (to his knowledge, at least), and he doesn't believe in heaven or God.

Sweeney Todd is not one to engage in pointless gestures. Sweeney Todd does not waste a gesture nor word more than is absolutely necessary.

What is so necessary about this?

_And you, Lovett? Why is it so necessary for you to watch? You know what you're going to see and you know what he's going to do and you know how it's going to make you hurt so . . . _

She'd taught herself Morse Code the instant she heard of it three years ago. She'd pinched up money that she didn't have in order to learn it from a passing sailor. She used to signal from that very same window, at that very same time, every night:

_Dash dot dot dot, dot, dash dot, dot dash dash dash, dot dash, dash dash, dot dot, dash dot._

_B-E-N-J-A-M-I-N._

She knew it was foolish. She knew it went against everything she told herself she would always be: practical, level-headed, wise about what little funds she had. A dreamer who knew she must dream in order to survive, but not someone who let such dreams get in the way of reality.

She wasn't stupid enough to think that her beams of light into the sky had anything to do with his return to London. Nonetheless, she couldn't help but think that there must have been some relation. That her flickers of candlelight into the heavens, her summons for him to come home, had shone down as sunrays in Australia, imprinting themselves upon his weathered back, twining into his soul.

For if not this explanation, what other one was there for his return home? Or for his return to her? Or for how he had now taken over the rote that had been hers, despite that she had never shared with him how she too knew Morse Code, nevermind that she had once signaled night after night as he now did?

Every night, at precisely one minute past one in the morning, he finishes the signal and she rips herself away from the window, pivoting her body to slouch her back against the counter, hands upon the sink.

Every night, at precisely two minutes past one in the morning, she cries dry tears onto her kitchen floor.

Every night, at precisely five minutes past one in the morning, she chides herself for being so irrational, gathers her wits, and straightens her spine.

Every night, at precisely six minutes past one in the morning, she travels upstairs to his barber shop and brands her lips upon his flesh. She doesn't need a signal to remind him where she is and where his home is anymore; she has herself, more tangible than any flashing lights into the nonexistent heavens, or silent wishes to a lost wife; she draws him into her embrace and makes him forget all that he cannot reach through his messages . . . or at least pretends that she can make him forget.

Every night, at no precise time – the time varies infinitely night to night depending on how long he allows her to embrace him and how much he needs her to make him pretend he can forget – she rests her arm on his stomach and her head over his heart and she taps out her own message that can never be reached upon his chest, nails grazing over his skin:

_Dot dot, dot dash dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot dash, dot, dash dot dash dash, dash dash dash, dot dot dash._

_I L-O-V-E Y-O-U._

* * *

**A/N:** Reviews are love.


	14. Heroes

30 Kisses #10: the number 10; fanfic50 #17: hero.

* * *

"Mr. Todd? Mind if I ask you a question?"

"Mmm," he replies vacantly from where they recline on her mattress, occupied with braiding her hair.

"Who's your hero?"

His fingers knot into her curls and still, their task forgotten. "What?"

She shifts her head in the nook of his arm, turning her face towards his. "Y'heard me, love. Who's your hero?"

"I – I don't have one."

He's never considered the matter, truth be told. As if there's anyone to admire in this scum-ridden world.

"Oh, don't be silly!" says Nellie. She bolts upright into a sitting position to stare down at him; his hands fall from her tangled hair and the sheets fall from her nude body. "Everyone's got a hero or two."

"You're comparing me to everyone?" he drawls.

She swats his arm. "C'mon, love. There must be someone you look up to."

He rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

She traces her nails along his chest, scratching faint, tingling pathways across his skin. "Alright, well, I'll tell you my list, and then maybe after I've opened up you'll be a bit more willing to share."

He quirks an eyebrow at her. The woman keeps a whole bloody list?

"It's an evolutionary list," she defends herself, in answer to his unspoken question. His eyes narrow; has his face really become so easily readable? "It changes as I get older. I'm on number ten right now." To illustrate, as though he will not understand without a visual aid, she bends both his arms up at the elbows and splays all ten of his fingers. "Ten of 'em."

He sighs and adjusts himself against her pillows, preparing himself for a long tirade.

"The first," she says, lifting his left palm into her two hands and laying a delicate kiss upon the tip of his pinky finger, "was my eldest brother, Robert. He could do everything I wanted to and couldn't, like throw a ball really fast or get his clothes muddy without being yelled at about acting like a proper young lady. And he never teased me the way my other brothers did. He always stuck up for me – or, when he wasn't around to stick up for me, comforted me afterwards, or snuck me a peppermint cream in the middle of the night. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up."

Does she honestly think he cares to know her life story in such intricate detail? His eyes roll upward before straying to the wall.

"Second – " she presses her lips to the fingertip of the ring finger on his left hand " – was Cinderella. Like every little girl, I wished to be a princess . . . I wished to be swept out of my silly little common life into something much greater. I adored Cinderella for being a little girl what made that wish come true. Then I realized that Cinderella hadn't done anything herself, and actually the one who deserved all the credit was her fairy godmother – really, that's the woman to admire, what with making the carriage and that gorgeous gown. So I threw out the Cinderella dreams."

Despite his irritation at her pointless chatter, and his disinterest in the topic at hand, and his determination to_ remain_ disinterested, he finds himself smirking: he can so easily picture a miniature Nellie Lovett discarding the silk ball gown of a dependant, incapable princess in favor of the peasant dress of an independent, strong-willed woman.

"After that – " a kiss upon his middle finger " – I fancied myself quite mature and wanted to read no more fairy tales. So my next hero was Medea."

Sweeney has even less trouble picturing a young Nellie admiring a woman who murders her own children.

"Next entered my historical period. Hatshepsut, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great." Each name is accompanied by another kiss to a fingertip; she releases his left hand and takes his right instead after 'Charlemagne,' when she runs out of fingers on that palm. "All people what'd done great things – and done these things all on their own, without any fairy godmothers helping out.

"Then, for some reason, I fell in love with fantasies again. I was grown up now, twenty-two or -three. King Arthur became my hero then." Her lips brush over the tip of his right middle finger. "A man what was not only kind, but a good leader and king – seemed like such an absurd concept. And my ninth hero was – "

Her lips freeze before they can touch his pointer finger.

"Was . . .?" Sweeney prompts. He loathes himself for asking; he tells himself he only feels compelled to ask because he wants to proceed to more important tasks that do not involve talking whatsoever, not because he cares to know.

Nellie tries to make herself swallow but finds her throat is frozen too.

The ninth was Benjamin Barker.

"Merlin," she rasps through her icy, numb vocal chords. "Was still stuck on the Arthurian legend, but decided I'd quite like to have some magical powers. Plus, he really did a lot of the work for Arthur, at least at first.

"And tenth – and the one that's my hero at present – " she clears her throat and kisses his thumb " – is Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt."

His lips curl into a smirk. His eyes stray from hers and travel lower down her body. "The virgin?"

She swats his shoulder again and he returns his gaze to hers, still smirking. "The one who not only protects others, but _can_ and _does_ protect herself. Someone truly worthy of admiration."

Settling her right hand over his stomach, she lays back down beside him, resuming her place in the crook of his arm. "Alright, love – now it's your turn. Who d'you admire?"

Sweeney sighs. "No one, Eleanor."

"Your father?" she persists, tapping her nails against his torso as though his flesh has transformed into a piano. "A former neighbor? Beowulf? Blackbeard?" Her face turns towards him again, and she pokes him particularly hard as she teases, "Jesus?"

"No," says Sweeney, unamused.

"Honestly, love, 's'not a hard question. You just pick someone what's got traits you have yourself, or traits you wish you had. What're things that you admire in a person?"

"Silence," says Sweeney pointedly.

He turns his eyes sideways to find Nellie glaring at him. He frowns, puzzled by the intensity of her stare: why does this mean so much to her?

Threading his fingers through her hair absent-mindedly – his hand desiring to finish the braid he'd started earlier – he flicks his eyes to the ceiling. "Determination, I suppose."

"And?" she probes.

"And . . . the will and courage to follow through, to make your desires happen."

"Keep going, love."

"And . . . disinterest in public opinion. The ability to deceive when necessary, or respond quickly under pressure . . ." The words begin to flow easier from his lips, from a place within him he never knew of until today. "Responsibility for one's own actions. A sense of justice and purpose. Tenacity. Strength. Loyalty."

"Quite a tall order there, love," says Nellie playfully. "So – know anyone who's got all those characteristics?"

He turns to her again, wide-eyed. When she catches his gaze, the teasing grin fades from her face.

He swallows. His mood has turned serious by sudden realization. By sudden understanding.

"You," he says.


	15. The Other End Of The World

30 Kisses #13: excessive chain; fanfic50 #16: goodbye.

* * *

"Goodbye, Lucy."

"Benjamin, please, don't go. Don't leave me all alone."

"I have to, my love. You know I have to."

"What am I supposed to do while you're gone?"

Nellie, watching the scene in her doorway from behind the counter as she flattens some dough, rolls her eyes. Honestly, from the way these two are carrying on, one would think that Benjamin was about to walk to the other end of the world – instead of just the market a few roads down.

"You were perfectly content knitting that blanket for our child some ten minutes ago," says Benjamin. Softly smiling, he touches Lucy's rounded belly; Nellie averts her gaze. "Surely you could continue that while I'm gone?"

"It isn't the same when you're gone," Lucy bemoans. "My fingers just don't knit the same way."

"Really, Lucy," says Benjamin, voice burbling with affectionate mirth, "now you're just being ridiculous."

Nellie can only look away for so long. Within the next second, her eyes yet again covertly study the couple. Like a moth to the flame: persistently flitting towards fire despite the fact that she knows fire burns, persistently drawn to her own destruction.

Lucy pouts. Only a woman as beautiful as her can make a jutting lower lip and sullen eyes seem attractive.

"I'll be back before you know that I've left," says Benjamin, gathering her hands in his. "I swear it."

Lucy looks up at him, still pouting. "And just what do you swear on?"

Benjamin leans towards her and kisses the top of her forehead. "You," he whispers into her hairline, eyes closed.

Lucy tries to fight a giggle, protruding lower lip quivering, dimples threatening to appear upon her cheeks. "Don't be ridiculous, Benjamin. People may only swear upon the Bible, or other holy artifacts, which I am most certainly not – "

"Nonsense," murmurs Benjamin, eyes still shut, mouth still whispering across Lucy's skin. "You most certainly are."

His lips descend slightly to press another kiss to her forehead, then another, down to her right temple, her cheek, along her jawbone, forging a chain of kisses along her face.

Nellie wants to roll her eyes again at this excessive display but finds she cannot move her eyes within their sockets until the endless kisses cease.

"I swear it," Benjamin whispers again. Nellie watches from her peripheral vision as he brushes his fingers across Lucy's stomach, then her face.

Before she can stop them, Nellie's gaze shoots upward again to look fully at Benjamin, to see him as directly and purely as possible, to engrave him to her mind as he will never engrave her to his. Her eyes burn, screaming for him to notice, to glance at her just once, see her standing there watching and waiting and wanting – even if he will never concede to her wants, at least let him see them, at least let him know her for the briefest of moments –

Benjamin smiles once more at Lucy before departing for the market without a single glance at his landlady, at the silently aching woman in his background.

Lucy stands in the doorway a moment, gazing after him, before casting a silly, love-struck grin at Nellie and beginning her slow, pregnant dawdle upstairs.

Nellie hopes that salt water adds a desirable flavor to pies. Otherwise she's just wasted an entire batch of dough.


	16. That Man Is Dead

A/N: For iBounce. As always, I sincerely apologize for the wait.

A severely AU take on the ST univerise. I originally wanted to turn this concept into a much longer novel, but . . . well, I don't have the patience for that. xD So I hope you enjoy this greatly condensed version.

* * *

30 Kisses #3: jolt!; fanfic50 #47: dare.

* * *

"I've never been to a funeral before," she tells him, leaning sideways with her shovel stuck in the dry earth and her hip resting against it. Her chin, lolling against hands clasped across the top of the shovel, tilts to one side to regard him from a different angle.

"Certainly never thought my first funeral'd be for a man what's still alive," she adds casually.

He pauses in his digging to press the end of the shovel into the ground and glare at her through hollowed, deadened eyes.

She looks at his fingers wrapped around his shovel, at the callused blisters upon his flesh. The blisters on his hands no longer crack open or suppurate as they did prior to his death. They are firm now upon his dead skin, branded into his body like a permanent map of his hardships. Branded into his body like hers are.

Nellie grins at him and he does not grin back. "Oh, I know, love," she says. "You're not that man anymore and he's long ago dead and you're a new man and so forth. I know all that – really, love, I do, I'm not making light of the situation. Just found it a bit ironic, is all, and wanted to share my thoughts."

"When do you _not _want to share your thoughts?" he grouses, rolling his eyes. He resumes the task of digging the hole, nearly five feet in both length and depth now. His tone rumbles low with anger, but she knows it's only a façade of anger. She knows it's only a matter of time before those hollowed, deadened eyes spark with darkly tender mirth.

So she has no fears about giggling, "Aw, Mr. T, it's hardly called for to insult the priestess before she makes a kindly speech over your dead body – erm – your former dead body – that is to say, the dead you of before – or dead spirit, or . . ."

"Eleanor, shut up," he says, tucking his chin against his chest to prevent her from seeing the darkly tender mirth spark in his hollowed, deadened eyes.

She sees it. She grins.

"Are you going to help or not?" he barks, gesturing to her idle shovel, and with a theatrically tragic sigh, she resumes her digging.

At last, the hole is finished, and her beloved lays down his shovel to gather what is to be buried.

_Her beloved_: it still thrills her heart to think those words, for he _is_ hers now. The both of them may be trapped upon this godforsaken spit of land . . . yet they have each other. She never thought she'd praise Turpin's name but – _praise fucking Judge Alexander Turpin_ – she bloody does. She praises Turpin's name more than even the Lord's: Turpin gave her what He never did when he sent her to Botany Bay thirteen years ago.

He throws a shredded shirt and pair of trousers into the handmade chasm of the earth, followed by a dirtied rag of a hat. She's not sure why the hole needed to be large enough to hold a man if all that has to fit within is one set of clothes, but decides not to ask. Her beloved – another pleasurable tremble spills down her spine – is a man of few words, and though she enjoys trifling and bantering with him, she knows her limits. To him, this funeral is far more than a few old garments sealed in the ground.

They refill the hole with dirt and pat it smooth, leaving only a tiny mound to mark the spot: one small enough to escape the guards' attention, but large enough so that it will never escape his or her vision when they walk past.

This accomplished, Nellie steps atop the grave, resting her shovel against the ground and gazing down at the little dome of dirt.

"Dearly beloved," she begins solemnly, "we are gathered here today – "

"This is a funeral, Eleanor, not a wedding."

"I know that," she huffs. "But, well, 's'also something of a celebration, don't you think? To be frank, love, I'm quite glad to finally be completely and truly shot of Benjamin. He was rather useless around the colony."

"He was," her beloved agrees. "That still does not make this a wedding."

Nellie lowers her eyelids to peer at him from beneath her lashes, twirling the shovel between her callused hands. "Well," she murmurs, sidling up to him, cozying against his chest, "it could be made into both a funeral _and_ a wedding – "

He jerks away from her the instant the word _wedding_ leaves her lips, like a jolt of electricity spasming across his muscles, and averts his eyes. "No."

"Love, how many times've I got to tell you? Lucy poisoned herself after you were shipped off – she's gone – "

Though not dead . . . but he doesn't need to know that.

" – you're no longer legally bound to be her husband – and that's the whole reason I'm here, remember? I kept trying to take Johanna from Turpin after he stole her, raise her like my own – and eventually he got so fed up with me that he sent me here – " she dares to lean her shoulder against his chest again, but he yanks away once more, glowering at a spot over her head " – that's why we're together now . . ."

"I won't marry you," he says, not looking at her.

"Why?" she demands. It's a conversation they've had many a time again, but never one that she's been able to get a proper answer to.

He merely shakes his head.

"You spend all of what little spare time we get here with me – you sneak out at night just to see me – you share the same bloody cot as me – and I know you care about me." She spits the accusations off her tongue, her soul burning. "We're wed in every bloody way but name – so _why not_?"

With effort, he turns eyes heavy with pain towards her. "I – I'm sorry, pet. I know I'm not legally bound to Lucy any longer – but something won't let me . . . a last betrayal to her . . ."

"She betrayed _you_ when she swallowed the arsenic," Nellie snarls, wincing away the instant the words escape her lips, bracing herself for his tornado of fury – but it does not come.

He merely looks at her, wearied, beaten. "I am yours, Nellie – and I will always be yours . . . but not ever in the way you wish. I can't."

Swallowing, eyes never breaking from his, she lays her shovel over the grave, then approaches him, not stopping until they stand a breath apart.

"Maybe the widowed Benjamin Barker can't ever marry again," she says. "Maybe he's too scarred by what the world did to him . . . too bound to his wife by soul despite no longer being bound by paper."

Not daring to breathe, she presses against him for the third time, resting her shoulder against his chest and her cheek upon his collarbone.

"But Sweeney Todd's not bound by paper or soul," she whispers. "Sweeney Todd's never had a wife."

His muscles convulse against her as another jolt of current flares through his body, fighting against something great and terrible rising like wildfire within him. He does not embrace her, but neither does he twist away.

"Perhaps the two men aren't as separate as I once claimed," he mutters.

"One of them's dead, love. Which means only one of them can live."

She feels rather than hears him swallow – feels rather than hears his heart throbbing against hers then ceasing, silencing: deciding. "Not yet, pet. Funeral's not over."

She kneels upon the dirt and kisses the mound. "May he rest in peace."

His hands settle upon her elbows and pull her back to a standing position, spinning her around to face him.

"I wasn't done giving the sermon – " she starts to protest, but his lips crash against hers and trap the rest of her words in her throat.

"Forget the funeral," he murmurs against her mouth when he pulls away for air. "I say that this church move right onto the christening – and – " his lips quiver, but his hands upon her waist and her eyes upon her eyes are steady as the river " – and the wedding."

Curling her fingers into the fabric of his shirt, she grins. "Welcome to the world, Sweeney Todd," she whispers as he leans in for another kiss.


	17. Fear of Infinity

30 Kisses #25: fence.

* * *

He fears infinity.

He fears the future, fears its unending span, fears that the present is the future and that it will never end.

He fears that nothing will change, that this is all that will ever be: this endless loop of pacing and snarling in front of his window, watching the outside world but never taking part.

Some days he can't take it any longer. Some days he storms down his stairs into the street to march directly to Turpin's house, break inside, and get it over with, finally give that bastard what's been coming to him for close on two decades.

"Now, you know you can't do that, love," says Nellie as she pushes him back through his door and returns him to his shop, forever animated and bustling about, forever trapping him in motionless space with her motion. "Not after we've worked so hard to go unnoticed and not draw any attention to ourselves. What if the neighbors saw you coming back with blood all over your hands? Or heard a commotion inside his house? How would you get the body back here without people seeing?"

"Let them see," he growls, struggling against her, his gestures as insistent and weak as a child: weak because his rational mind knows she's right, insistent because whatever remains of his heart throbs to a different tune. "Let them see his mangled body – his pathetic screams – the pain he's brought upon the world – "

From behind, she embraces his waist, her grasp as insistent and weary as a mother: weary because this tantrum has been thrown too many times, insistent because she needs something solid to grasp onto in this world of intangibles. "And then what, Mr. Todd? You just let yourself get thrown in jail, or tossed onto another ship bound towards Botany Bay – or sent to the gallows?"

_Fine,_ he thinks, still struggling inside her arms, but also sagging, draining. _At least it would be something different. At least then this deathless eternity would end._

"You want something like that to happen just 'cause you killed one stupid man?" She buries her face in the crook of his neck, squishing her nose and her mouth against his flesh, suffocating herself in him. "You want to end your life just 'cause you couldn't wait a little teeny bit longer?"

_This isn't life, my dear: this spiral of time where hours and days are swallowed by a great expanse of nothingness – where this fence that traps me, this fence of windows and blood and your endless motion can never be torn down – where I will forever watch and wait for justice that cannot come._

"C'mon downstairs, love," she whispers into his skin, contusing a kiss upon the side of his throat that burns like rushing lava and aches like a punch. "It's nearly midnight – and it's cold down in my bed, on my own – without you . . ."

In a sudden fit of strength and rage and fear, he breaks free from the ring of her arms and stalks to his window.

"Leave me be," he snarls.

From behind, she is silent. No babbling words, no treading footsteps to indicate either an approach or a departure. No inhales of air. Only an endless eternity of soundless sound and motionless motion and he wishes to break free of this too – but he can't.

"Y'know, love," she hisses to his turned back, "it's understandable that you fear all this pain and shit never changing or ending – I'm afraid of that too."

A confession. A pause in her words as she waits for his acceptance, for his sympathy, for any damn thing.

Nothing comes. She snorts at herself for daring to believe anything would.

"But y'know what?" she spits at his turned back. "You've got a piece of the solution in your hands – it's not just the universe or the fates or whatever in control – you've got some control too: you can change yourself."

When he pivots around to face her, he sees only his shop door slamming shut.


	18. A Seaside Wedding

**A/N:** I normally forget to do replies to anonymous reviews, but I did want to give a quick shout out to Artemis Vandeley. It was an absolute joy to suddenly discover eleven new reviews in my inbox, so thank you for brightening my day with those, dear. And no, I absolutely don't mind if you use Morse Code in a future story of yours; I certainly don't own it!

* * *

An alternate ending.

* * *

30 Kisses #11: gardenia; fanfic50 #13: rational.

* * *

Her hands are syrupy with sweat, wrapped around my stems. Her fingers and palms are callused, careworn; her grip warm is too tight. I do not protest: this is her moment, not mine . . . though why she desires this moment, why her breathing atop my petals is so rapid, or her smile plays across her lips yet hides from the world behind my petals, I do not know.

Beside me, limbs careful not to so much as graze my flowers, he stands. In stark contrast to the heat washing over my petals with each of her strained inhales, the space to the left of my stems is neutral, cold, as though this is no cause for desire or delight of any kind. But what else could a wedding be if not desire for the other person, desire to exist no longer as half of a whole – what else could it be if not delight at finally learning how to live?

"We are gathered here today . . ." the priest begins, and her hands tremble, slipping sideways for a moment upon my stems before righting themselves, sweat so thick it is more a blanket for the winter than drizzled syrup now, grip so tight I fear her fingers or my stems might break – or both.

The priest continues talking, but I do not think that she listens: her breathing over me is softer now, more distanced. Her chin is lifted, no longer hiding her grin from the world behind my flowers, and tilted to the left, to him. He remains unmoved, frigid and impervious to both body heat and smiles.

"Please, love – be happy," she whispers. Her voice is so quiet, her lips moving so little over the syllables, that the priest cannot hear, and since the man beside her does not stir, I assume that he cannot hear either. But she continues speaking as though she knows he has, as though the stillness of his body is just as much of a reaction as electricity spasming across his muscles:

"I know this isn't what you wanted – I know this was never your dream – but you've got to know that it's for the best . . . the police would've caught up with us after we made such a mess with Bamford and Turpin . . . and I know you wanted to find Lucy's grave before we left for the seaside, but there just wasn't time, they would've caught us – but now they haven't – now we're free . . . now we're free to – to work and talk and – and live – together . . . this's for the best – "

"Do you hear me complaining?" he inquires in the same soft, nearly nonexistent tone of she, lips not even appearing to lift away from their taut line, unsmiling and unfrowning, as he speaks.

"No," she breathes into my petals. "That's the problem, love. I don't hear you at all."

"There is nothing to say, Mrs. Lovett."

"Please stop calling me that. You've not called me anything else since we've run off, and I've said nothing, but please don't do it anymore. Not here, when we're about to get – when we're s'posed to be – "

"Mrs. Lovett is your name. I can't retrain myself after nearly twenty years of knowing you as such."

"You didn't always used to call me that," she intones, the syllables grating yet melodious, a broken song of whispers too long unsung. "You used to use my given name too – back on Fleet Street, back before all this ended – or began – back when – " the whispers choke for a moment and a droplet of water plunges upon my petals, stings my skin with its salt " – back when you seemed to give a damn about me – "

"You've just answered your own question, pet," he says, his tone as impartially cool as before – but when, for the first time, he turns his eyes towards the both of us, it is like a blast of the hottest flame, fire too long masquerading as ice, a last confession of pain. "I can't give a damn anymore. About anything."

Another scalding liquid pearl falls upon my petals. "Don't be silly, love – you're just refusing to care about anything right now but – but you still can – surely you still can – surely you never expected anything but this ending, surely you never expected Turpin's spilled blood to somehow flow into Lucy and let you both start again – "

" – you may now kiss the bride," the priest declares.

Their lips meeting over my blossoms is more a wound than a seal, more destruction than creation.

When they part, and when she tosses me over her head into the pews, no one catches me as they are supposed to catch a bride's bouquet.

Instead I land upon my side, half my petals crushed against the floor, bruised and ruined. Her sweat runs off my stems in rivulets. I wait for someone to pick me up, to claim me as their own, so I may witness creation at least once before my buds wilt –

But the pews are empty.

* * *

**A/N**: This little fic was inspired by prompt #341 on www (dot) creativewritingprompts (dot) com. The challenge was to write a story from the perspective of a wedding bouquet. I knew immediately I had to try my hand at such an intriguing idea.

P.S. Reviews are love. Have I mentioned that lately?


	19. In That Darkness When I'm Blind

30 Kisses #7: superstar.

* * *

Sweeney doesn't immediately notice when Nellie falls asleep beside him at the park.

He's so used to not paying attention to her that the realization is quite slow to dawn. For, though not pay attention to her he most assuredly lives up to, even he is not completely oblivious – so when her incessant chatters slows to a dawdle and then ceases altogether, he notices.

Curious as to what has managed to mute her – a task he finds impossible even on the best of days – Sweeney turns his head to the side. His eyes go wide: she is sprawled next to him on the picnic blanket, dress indecently thrown up at one side and exposing a stockinged calve and knee, right elbow in the jam dish, hair a mess as ever – and she is asleep.

_Asleep_, of all things! The bloody woman never sleeps, and she chooses _now_ to slumber. If she so desperately wanted to spend the afternoon in the park with him – and she _had _been desperate: she'd dragged him out of the house, quite literally – then she should bloody well spend the afternoon with him and not with unconsciousness!

_You're jealous that she'd rather spend her time with sleep than with you? Really, Todd?_

No, of course he is not jealous. He is annoyed, that's all. She had the audacity to force him from his window and drag him to the park – all so she could bloody catch a bit of shut eye?

His lips pull into a smirk. Well, he'll just have to repay her in kind, won't he?

Smile dancing in his eyes, he leans over her, their faces a breath apart, preparing to grab her neck and startle her awake.

She is perfectly stationary as he hovers over her – stationary: a word he never associates with her, a woman always animated, especially when he hovers so near to her – her thin lips silent and relaxed in a natural pout, her face free of its usual strain lines from enduring a smile, her eyelids closed and her eyelashes forming two black crescent moons upon her skin . . .

And he finds his hands reaching out to graze rather than to grab, to rearrange rather than to scare or hurt. He puts one palm beneath her neck, the other on her back, and hoists her off the blanket just enough to slide her head sideways into his lap, her skull against his right thigh. He kneads his fingers into her curls and massages her scalp with fingertips lighter than feathers, too weightless to awaken her from her slumber. He quietly observes the midday sky grow darker, the afternoon sun disappearing as the moon chases it towards the horizon, the stars winking cues for the clouds to vanish.

He does not wear a watch, so he does not know how many hours have gone by before he feels movement against his thigh: Nellie shifts her head, her fingers curling into the picnic blanket, her eyes still closed, her mouth murmuring to both her dreams and to the reality she is just beginning to awaken to:

"Mmmm . . . that feels good, Mr. T . . . don't . . ."

With great effort, she parts her eyelids. Brown eyes stare into brown eyes, then Nellie tears her gaze away, notes the dark sky, and bolts into a sitting position.

"_Shit_! What time is it? How long've we been here? Oh, and the shop's got to be open tomorrow, and Toby'll be wondering why we're getting home so late, and I've still got to chop up that bloke from yesterday before he rots, and why the hell didn't you wake me up – "

"I didn't want to," says Sweeney.

She gapes at him, open-mouthed, cheeks burning with pink ire and eyes burning with hopeless hope. "I – well – that's very sweet and all, love, but both of us've got to open shop tomorrow, y'know, and it's going to be at least a half hour before we even walk home, unless we cough up enough for a buggy, but I don't think – "

"Lie down," says Sweeney.

Stymied, Nellie obeys, returning her head to nestle against his thigh.

"The stars are dancing in hell tonight," he says as he gazes up into the sky, his fingers resuming their massage of her scalp.

She shifts her head to the side so her nose is buried in his shirt and his scent, purring her satisfaction into his skin. "I think you're getting a little confused with your sense of direction there, Mr. T. Hell's below us, not above. The stars're in heaven. Well, I mean, if you still believe in a heaven. Personally, I'm starting to think we all deserve nothing less than hell – "

"I'm not confused at all, Mrs. Lovett," Sweeney assures her.

"C'mon, now, love," she cajoles. "Don't be silly. The stars can't be down in hell. They're up there in the sky."

He shrugs one shoulder. "All stars eventually fall."

"Always such a bloody pessimist," Nellie grumbles. "Can't you just be happy for once?"

"Sweeney Todd does not know how to be happy," he growls, weaving his hands through her hair, studying the night.

"Silly, impossible man . . . everyone knows how to be happy – it's just a matter of finding what makes you feel it . . ."

But it is true – Sweeney Todd doesn't know how to be happy. And yet . . . he tips his head back, letting the moonlight cascade over his face, illuminating his form against the dark tree and the black sky . . . and yet tonight he feels strange, different, perfectly fine to stay just where he is. This cannot be happiness, but he has forgotten the name of this relative of happiness, this emotion flowing easy as water and welcome as liquor through his veins. Relaxation? Pride? Peace? Complacence?

Whatever its name, whyever he feels like this, he does not want to let it go. He closes his eyes against the moonlight; he weaves his hands through her curls, letting them slip and slide like burgundy streams of wine, but always catching the droplets before they fall away completely, refusing to allow one of the few remaining things that he can call his own leave his grasp . . .

_He closes his eyes against the sunlight; he weaves his hands through her locks, letting them slip and slide like golden streams of sand, but always catching the grains before they fall away completely, refusing to allow himself to forget what a blessing this tender moment is, what a blessing it is that this moment exists . . ._

He shoots to his feet, limbs trembling, head reeling, the debris of his heart aching; Nellie's head falls from his thigh and she cries out as her skull hits the ground, but he does not hear.

He begins to stalk forward, needing to leave, needing to escape her and his memories and the fact that he will always be Benjamin Barker no matter what he tells her or his customers or himself –

And yet he cannot escape, does not want to escape – the memories are all he has of Lucy – and he cannot forget her – he cannot let Nellie Lovett steal Lucy's memories, not when she has already stolen Lucy's role as his companion and her scent in his nostrils and her place in his bed – not when she risks stealing the debris of his – _no_ –

He stops when he realizes that the darkness of the night sky has confused his sense of direction and he no longer knows where he is, how to leave. Which direction he could ever possibly find an escape.

"Sweeney?" Nellie whispers.

Every fiber of his body fights against him as he whirls back around to face her. She is again sprawled upon the picnic blanket, dress indecently thrown up at one side and exposing a stockinged calve and knee, right elbow smeared purple with jam, hair a mess as ever –

Wide awake. Watching him. Not pleading for his return, nor demanding it. Just waiting for it – whether his return ever takes place or not, she is waiting – always . . .

"I can't let you steal her memories too," he whispers.

It's only a fragment of a thought, only a incoherent snatch from his jumbled mind, but Nellie understands it in full – and more.

_Damn her for understanding too much, what no one should, what only Lucy should – _

_Bless her for understanding what no one else could, what not even I do . . ._

"Love," she whispers, her skin glowing in the moonlight, "I'm not trying to steal anything from her. I'm trying to create something new – something of our own."

His limbs are trembling, still ready to escape – still hating to escape, needing to remain – still not knowing which way leads to either.

She looks at him, waiting.

Shaking – heart beating against him no matter which course he chooses, mind for once silent again with that strange emotion he never wants to relinquish – he takes a step forward, then another, and another, until he stands above her.

His legs fold beneath him and bring him to his knees; his hands crawl forward so that his body again hovers above hers – yet again, she lies stationary beneath him – even despite being conscious this time, she is stationary, she waits to see what he will do, what he will allow her, or allow himself . . .

His lips graze over hers, soft at first, then urgent with their need to escape – because he's chosen escape, and she is the escape – or perhaps she is not the escape, but the persistent reminder not to escape, not to forget – for how can he forget with her in his arms rather than his wife, how can he ever hope to escape with the reminder of what he's trying to leave behind trailing her fingers along his spine –

Either way, it doesn't matter. Either way, it makes no difference.

She fists one hand in his hair and tears with the other at the buttons upon his shirt; she wraps her legs around his waist and pulls him tight against her. Her spell of stillness is broken and he revels in it, in how her lips grasp with just as much urgency as his, in how she rips fabric in her haste to get his clothes off, in how she trembles with so much light in the darkness.

Either way, it doesn't matter.

Either way, he's chosen.

* * *

**A/N: Not totally happy with this one, but I figured we could use a bit of fluff after the last several installments being a bit heavier.**

**As always, feedback is my lifeblood. Therefor,e you must review to keep me alive for many years to come . . . or to keep me alive at least long enough for Sweeney and Nellie to have all thirty of their kisses. ;D**

**Also, extra brownie points if you picked up on the reference to another Sondheim musical. ^^**


	20. An Endless Whispered Prayer

30 Kisses #29: sound of waves; fanfic50 #35: drugged.

* * *

His hair tickling her skin, his lips playing across the back of her neck at his leisure, his fingers unknotting the laces of her corset just as lackadaisically, knowing he does not have to rush, knowing that there is no rush and that she will wait, and content with that fact . . .

Her layers of clothing falling to the ground one by one, melting from her body like snow, dissolving from her physique and from her thought, her body blazing from the inside out as if she had swallowed a ray of sun . . .

His hands settling against her bare form and lifting her into his arms, his feet treading across the room, his body bending to lay her across their mattress as softly as a delicate doll, or as reverently as an alter offering . . .

His body straightening, his eyes gazing down at her supine form with all the veneration due the offering – with all the love due a soul mate . . .

His body lowering upon hers to worship as he is meant to before taking, fingers reverencing, breath adoring, eyes thanking, lips molding in endless whispered prayer: _". . . I love you, I love you, I love you, Nellie Todd . . ."_

Their bodies meeting to the sound of the waves outside their window, crashing softly against the shore then murmuring away in retreat, steady, constant, smooth, perfect . . .

Then she wakes up.

She wants to fall back asleep and return to the dream, but can't.

She doesn't want to cry into her pillow, but does.

Not much of a loss, she figures, not being able to fall back into slumber. After all, what's the use of continuing to hope and dream for what can never be? After all, how can she criticize him for living in a world that doesn't exist – a world where justice can be served and happiness reached just by slaughtering some nameless men – if she doesn't live in a world that exists either?

Tomorrow, of course, she knows that is precisely what she will resume doing. She knows how to survive no other way.

She is just as dependent on the drug of a fabled reality as her barber.

And just as intoxicated.


	21. Enough

**A/N:** An alternate ending.

* * *

30 Kisses #22: cradle.

* * *

You are holding a baby in the crook of your arms when I peer through the window to look at you.

Your body is positioned to the side, so you don't see me standing outside. Your hips lean to the right, propped against a crib; your arms swings side to side slowly, elbows jutting outwards, as you rock the tiny human; your neck protrudes out, extending diagonally from your spine, to allow you to observe the baby's face.

Your posture is all sharp edges and lines, but you've never looked so comfortably curved: your once angular bones, protruding from what little fat you had, are concealed in a healthy amount of flesh now; your once bone-tight corset is loosened, no doubt to make a post-pregnancy waistline more durable. The extra weight does not give you the appearance of plumpness. Instead, it gives you one you never had: of salubrity, of vibrancy. Of life.

Your body is clothed in some ridiculous contraption of a million laces and frills and pleats, the sort of ridiculous contraptions you always admired when we walked together in the marketplace but could not afford. Your skin is no longer abnormally pale, with purple trophies of sleepless nights under your gaze, but glowing, gently tanned by the sunshine; your eyes do not sit hollow in their sockets, but gleam in the refracted light from the window's glass, alive and awake; your hair is a mess as ever atop your head, but at least it is clean now, and at least you've stopped dying it that awful artificial carnelian and allowed it to return to its natural burgundy.

Your lips are cantering in a string of syllables, some combination of nursery rhymes and chatter that I can't make out, and it takes me a moment to realize I should not be able to make out what you are saying, for you are speaking in baby-talk. That is one thing that has not changed about you, one thing that I remember well: your inability to close your mouth even when you were, quite literally, spewing gibberish.

You are joined by a man I have never seen before. Your mouth smiles when you see him approach and he leans towards you, over the baby, to press a kiss over your lips, concealing your smile from the world and from the man you do not know is watching through your window.

My hand fists around the object inside my pocket.

Your mouth is still smiling when he pulls away from you. The kiss has stamped a matching smile upon his lips. You say something to him and his smile widens as he nods. Brushing your lips over the baby's forehead, you place it inside the cradle, swaddling the little body with too many blankets for such a mildly sunny day, with too much love.

Your elbow is touched by the man. You grin at him and allow him to guide you out of the room, leaving nothing for me to see through the glass but the crib. My eyes fix upon the panes and my hand tightens inside my pocket. This is the moment I have waited for: the moment in which I will not be seen as I sneak into your home, in which I will do what I should have – what I was too disgustingly weak to do – one year ago.

The moment in which I will murder you.

You tried to convince me we could still have a life together, even if I was not alive, even if my life lay strewn behind me in a heap of beggar clothes and blood as a visceral reminder of how you had destroyed me. Even as I danced you towards death.

You fled the bakehouse after my hands could not throw you inside the flaming portal to hell.

You did not think me able to murder you. You did not think that I could kill you, not when you had given me everything: a place to store my victims, a place and the means to live, food, comfort, understanding, affection, trust . . .

But you also took away everything.

And my hands are capable now.

I seize the latch of the window and slowly, silently push it open. I hoist myself through and land noiselessly upon the ground, my eyes upon the door, my pocket burning as I step towards it to pursue you –

Then my eyes fall to the cradle. My mouth smiles as a new idea seizes hold.

I will destroy your life just as you destroyed mine. I will destroy your life without ever laying a finger upon your filthy skin again.

I stalk towards the crib. The baby is asleep.

Your baby. Your life that you put into another body and foolishly believed would remain unharmed.

My hand descends into my pocket, closes around my razor, and lifts it up, letting it breathe the world's air.

The blade _snick_s open with a swipe of my thumb. Mouth smiling, nostrils flaring to inhale the precious scent of victory, dead heart pulsating, I raise my arm above my head.

Your baby opens its eyes.

Your baby. Your baby's eyes. Your life that I am about to destroy gazing up at me. Your baby.

But those eyes are _mine_ . . .

I drop the razor.

I reel backwards. I climb out of the window and close it behind me, as slowly and soundlessly as I entered. I walk away from the window, from my razor on your floor, from your home, from your healthy body and smiling mouth. From our baby's eyes.

My shoes squish through the sand with each step I take, the waves roaring in my ears, the perfume of salt and pain suffocating in my nostrils. You fulfilled your dream of living by the sea.

I used to believe that I was the dream. I used to believe that it wasn't the seaside cottage and blue briny that really mattered, just who was there to see and appreciate it alongside you – to see and appreciate you. I didn't care one way or the other what you dreamed, of course . . . but I still thought that the dream was me.

Now I know that's untrue. Now I know that the sea was the dream all along, that you needed someone to see and appreciate it alongside you – but that it did not matter who it was, so long as they could see further than from behind their window.

I fist my hands in my pockets: I cannot destroy you for being able to live. I cannot destroy you for simply being able to do what I never could.

So I am walking away from you.

You appear like a phantom before me, sudden and with no announcement.

Except there could never be any replica, ghost or otherwise, of you.

You rise from behind a mound of craggy rocks beside the shore, your comfortable curves aligning as you straighten your spine, tall and firm as a soldier marching to his victory – or to his death.

My feet halt upon the sand.

Your ridiculous excuse for a dress and your hair blow in the breeze as you approach. Your steps are too dawdling to be called a march, but too firm and syncopated to be called a meander. Your mouth is not smiling, but lies straight across your face, firm, purposeful.

You do not cease your walk until you stand before me, our bodies almost touching. Your head is tilted up and your breath falls softly on my chin. Your eyes anchored to mine. You may not have seen me through the window, but you knew I was here all along.

You always knew I would be here.

I open my mouth but you lay a finger over my lips, shaking your head, you who revels in motion and speech mutely telling the silent and dead man to not speak. There must be some irony to this, but I do not find anything amusing at the moment.

I close my lips but your finger remains resting upon them, your eyes resting upon my face. Slowly, your fingertip traces the outline of my mouth, across my cheek, about my jawline, down and around my neck in a silent and bloodless imitation of my blade.

Suddenly, your entire hand joins your single pointer finger at my neck, clasped about my throat, your eyes scalding with fire. Blood rushes to my head in instinctual panic and my hand jumps for my pocket – but my razor still lies upon the floor of your seaside home – I am utterly defenseless against you –

But maybe I always was.

My fingers untense, the pounding in my head calms, and I relax into your strangulation hold.

Perhaps this is better. Perhaps this is how we were always meant to end.

After all, there is no point keeping a dead man among the living.

Then you shoot up onto your tiptoes and crush my mouth against yours. Your left hand seizes my waist, pulling me flush against your body; your other hand remains at my throat, fingers caressing the bare skin of my neck as intimately as if we were in bed, alone together, just like we used to be.

Yours is not a hold of strangulation, but of security.

You are not murdering me, but keeping me alive.

Your kiss ends as instantly as it began: you jerk away from me without warning. Your face is impassive, your eyes neutral; the only betrayal of our kiss is your mouth, swollen and flushed crimson.

Then you leave me, running away as fast as you possibly can in the opposite direction, towards your seaside cottage and your husband and our baby.

I could run after you and catch you easily without exertion. I remain where I am.

Your dream might still be me, but we both know you can never obtain what you desire most. So this will have to be enough.

My pocket is heavy and warm with a familiar weight. Curious, I slide my hand inside the fold of fabric. My mouth smiles as your figure disappears into the horizon:

You returned to me my razor.

* * *

**A/N: **Reviews are love.


	22. Forgetting Forever

30 Kisses #2: news/letter; fanfic50 #28: forever.

* * *

"Mr. Barker?"

She might as well not be there. Benjamin crouches on her settee like a wounded animal, white-faced and petrified, knees balled up to his chest, eyes dilated and fixed straight ahead upon nothing.

"Mr. Barker? Mr. Barker?" Nellie sits down next to him, a respectable distance of three inches between their thighs. Still, he does not stir.

She tries to swallow the knot forming in her throat. Her body aches to get closer; her heart batters in her chest. Never has she seen him look miserable. Certainly there have been occasions where he's lost that grin that fits so naturally onto his face – no one can always be happy – but true anguish is one that his canonic features have been blessed enough never to know how to wear.

Not until tonight.

Not as adept as acting a statue as he, Nellie raps her fingers against her knees, bites her lips, clears her throat, crosses and uncrosses her ankles – anything to prevent stillness and allow the rising tide of anxiety and worry and love to overtake her.

"For God's sake, Mr. Barker," she says, "what's happened?"

No reply.

Since straight questions clearly have no effect, she switches tactics: "Why're you down here so late? You should be upstairs with your wife enjoying the evening or getting a good night's rest before the next day – "

"I can't," Benjamin whispers. Finally: a reaction. His lips are the only part of him to move amidst a rigid mask of anguished terror.

"You can't what?"

"I can't be up there."

Nellie frowns. "Why ever not?"

He shakes his head. "I can't – not after . . ." He trails off into nothingness; whatever brief spell granted him the power of speech has vanished.

Her heart shoots upward to palpitate in her throat, warning her not to move, not to cross any boundaries that cannot be crossed, not ever crossed – but surely in such a time of need these boundaries can be tip-toed across, surely he needs comfort and would not object if she moved just a little closer, offered a bit of comfort beyond the restricting role of landlady – certainly she was not entitled to hold him against her and hear her heart rhyme to his, but certainly she could at least hear his pulse, even if they could never be allowed to rhyme . . .

She lays a hand on Benjamin's shoulder; he flinches but does not draw away.

"Love, I'm no mind reader," she murmurs, "and I don't like guessing games neither, 'specially not when they ain't at all about happy things. I've been working in my shop all day and I clearly missed something important. Please tell me what it was."

But he has returned to a statue and cannot answer.

Hand quivering, she slides her fingers down his shoulder and along the length of his arm. Then she begins to tug at his legs, beckoning them to loosen from their crouch against his chest. Like an invalid or a marionette, he obeys the pressure of her fingertips unconsciously and unquestioningly, knees slowly unlocking and permitting his legs to lengthen and touch the floor.

Her heart has journeyed into her head, hammering against her mind and filling her ears with the rush of blood and exploding blots of red in front of her eyes. Never does she physically touch him – not out of respect for Lucy; Nellie Lovett would have no qualms about becoming the lover of a married man – but out of respect for Benjamin. He is far too upright, loyal, and most of all loving a man to ever cheat on his wife. If she is to be honest with herself, that is part of his appeal; there aren't many London males who possess such honest chivalry these days.

Yet here she sits tonight with her hands all over him. Tonight is different, though – it must be different – it _is_ different: tonight breaks no boundaries; tonight continues to respect his integrity. Tonight he needs her – not as she wants him to, not as she needs him – but he needs her.

Finished with straightening his legs, Nellie reaches to unclasp his hands from their ring around where his legs had been – but the moment her fingers graze the back of his palm, he leaps away from her, shoulder slamming into the armrest of the settee.

"_Benjamin."_

For the first time all evening, he pivots his eyes towards her, and suddenly she has no idea how she has never before known how to be a statue, never before known how to be the epitome of stillness, because in this moment – with his eyes and attention upon only her, with her body stopped and her head stopped and her heart stopped and yet still alive, so alive, how can one be more alive with a silent heart than a throbbing one – she can be naught else.

Slowly, his eyes never straying from hers, he unclasps his hands and unfurls his fingers to reveal a bible of blood imprinted upon his palms.

Nellie reels back to herself with a thundering gasp of her heart, body jerking away from Benjamin, then towards, then away again.

"Mr. Barker, I don't – you – why don't you wash that out before someone sees?" she finally manages to ask.

A smile twitches over his anguished face. "Forever practical, aren't you, Mrs. Lovett? Your first thought is not where the blood came from, but that I must wash it off before I am linked to suspicious activities."

Nellie's cheeks flush. "I didn't mean – I just didn't want to seem as though I were questioning your character, Mr. Barker – that is to say, were you to injure or kill – I mean – well – it'd be with just cause since it's you, and I only meant to affirm that I – and anyhow it's not my business – "

"Lucy had her baby."

"Her – but the babe's not due for three months yet – " Her eyes widen. "Oh God – Benjamin – "

"She was stillborn," comments Benjamin, his gaze and tone as casual as though they are discussing the weather. "I would have come to get you when it began – but it was the middle of dinner rush at your shop and you had your hands more than full –"

"Y'ought to know I would've dropped it all in a tick for you, love," she whispers, but he does not hear.

" – and I didn't want to interrupt you, and the midwife was too far away to fetch, and Lucy needed someone there with her, and I knew it was too early – that it wouldn't matter who was present anyhow because the end result would be the same . . ."

He lowers his gaze to his hands. He flexes and curls his fingers, expands and compresses his palm, watching the trellis of blood upon his skin shift with each movement.

"I'm so sorry, Benjamin," she whispers. "I – I know what it's like to lose a child."

He looks up from his bloodwork and locks eyes with her, and she realizes how little he knows about her despite a year of living in the room above, despite how much she talks to him, despite how sincerely he looks as though he is listening even as Lucy is lovingly fiddling with his collar or kissing his hair . . .

But he is listening now. She forces her stagnant heart to continue to beat, and her dry mouth to continue to speak:

"I wish I could tell you it's going to get easier, or you'll get used to it. But it doesn't and you won't. It's – it's going to carve out some empty little space inside of you . . . and you'll never be able to fill it up again. It's going to hurt you, no matter how long ago it's been – it's going to hurt when you think back on the day you held that cold little body in your arms, before finally being forced to admit you can never make that cold body warm. . . . It's going to slowly kill you – but you've got to keep going."

"There was so much blood," Benjamin observes, as though still commenting on a subject with no more weight than the weather – then he collapses into sobs.

This time no thoughts of propriety or respect or boundaries could prevent her – this time no thoughts even reach her – from reflexively reaching out and wrapping her arms around him.

"Shhh, love, shhhh."

He doesn't shift about inside the ring of her arms to lean his head upon her chest, or to put his arms around her in return, but neither does he worm away. She is not sure that he could; she is not sure if he can muster any thoughts in this moment either.

"Shh, love, hush now, darling."

She will not tell him that it's all going to be okay; she will not lie to him, at least not if they both know it's untrue. So instead, she will merely hug him close and murmur into his hair and wish that she could feel delighted at finally being able to hold him in her arms. Because, for some stupid reason, she can't.

"Shh, love, shh."

"There was so much blood," says Benjamin again, his cheek pressed against her shoulder, his hair kissing her neck, his body trembling inside her embrace. "I never knew there was so much – and I didn't know how to stop it, or get rid of it – I never knew I'd feel so afraid when confronted with death – do you know I'm afraid of death, Nellie?"

It's the first time he's ever used her first name and she wishes it weren't because she fears it'll be the last time too. This isn't how she wants to remember hearing that most beloved word on his lips.

"I know that sounds silly, to be afraid of the inevitable – and really, it's not a thing to be afraid of, just a new step after life – and who's to say we won't still be alive? we shall still be as alive as ever in God's eyes, so why should _our_ eyes see any differently? – and I'm sure it sounds especially silly to you because you're not afraid of anything – but I am afraid of death . . . or at least, I was in that moment, with all that blood on the bed and on my hands – and how there was nothing I could do about it. . . ."

Nellie finds herself shaking: in all the time she's known him, Benjamin has never been a babbler by nature. True, he has never been opposed to conversing with her, but neither has he ever rambled on so uncomprehendingly, as though he's not even hearing the words that he speaks . . .

"It wasn't fair and it wasn't just . . . and how could God take such an innocent creature? – or even if it was not His hands that took her, how could He allow her to be taken? It's almost worse to think of God being apathetic than sadistic – and I shouldn't speak against Him, and I don't mean what I say . . . or at least, I mean it now, but I won't mean it once everything normalizes itself again – normalizes itself as much as it can, at least – "

She silences him by drawing her body away, arms slipping down the length of his arms to clasp his crimson-stained hands within hers. The blood feels dried against her skin, permanent, forever fused to him – but not to her. Nonetheless, she squeezes his fingers, as though to brand him and his pain and his life and this moment that is only theirs, not in any part Lucy's, to her skin forevermore.

His head lifts. His smooth-shaven cheeks are soiled damp with tears; his luxurious, thick locks mused. His red-rimmed eyes squint at her as if through a haze.

She opens her mouth to speak, but realizes that she has nothing to say. Certainly she could throw words together to form some sentences and some sentences together to form speeches, as she so often does, but now is not the time for purposeless babble. She has nothing to say that would ease his pain, nothing to say that would bring a smile to his face or erase the past. Nothing to say that any thrown-together words could ever hope to accomplish.

Nellie grips his hands in hers, leans forward, and rests a kiss upon his hairline.

Her lips linger a second longer than befits a married woman, a second longer than necessary. If Benjamin notices, he does not comment.

She pulls away and gets to her feet. "You've got to return upstairs now, love. Lucy'll be needing you."

He stares up at her through bloodshot, pleading eyes. She wants to wince away from the stare – she does not want to see Benjamin Barker reduced to pleading for anything – but knows she must remain stolid.

"I can't be strong for her any longer," he whispers.

"Then let her see you broken," says Nellie.

He doesn't answer, just looks at her, still broken, still pleading. Pleading for what? What does he want her to give him? More attempts at comfort? Protection from the pain? Answers? To what?

"Let her see you broken," Nellie repeats. "No point in hiding from the one person in the world you're s'posed to stand with come hell or high water, is there?"

He blindly shakes his head. "Two broken people can't comfort each other."

"But they can be together," says Nellie.

With an effort too painfully concentrated for such a young man, Benjamin stands, still looking at her. They never unclasped hands, Nellie realizes, suddenly again aware of his flesh pressed into hers.

"Thank you," says Benjamin. "I won't forget this, Nellie."

But as he returns to his shop, as she hears his feet clobbering earnestly against the stairs leading to his wife, she wonders if he already has.

xxx

"Mrs. Lovett?"

He might as well not be there. Nellie crouches on her mattress like a wounded animal, white-faced and petrified, knees balled up to her chest, eyes dilated and fixed straight ahead upon nothing.

Sweeney sits down next to her, perplexed. If there is one ability Nellie Lovett does not possess, it is silent stillness. And yet she has not shifted even a fraction of an inch, even despite the fact that he sits nearly thigh-to-thigh with her, their legs all but touching.

He doesn't know what to say or do, and apparently Nellie doesn't either, so they sit like that for a long while, not speaking, not touching, his eyes upon her and her eyes upon nothing, two statues of sickly ivory stone and canonical features made cadaverous by the cruelty of time.

After two minutes or two eternities, Sweeney's gaze lowers to trace along her body, searching for the answers she cannot speak to the questions he cannot ask – and sees a tiny scarlet river running from Nellie's nightgown into her sheets.

He stares at the red stained against the white, stares as it imbeds itself into the cotton of her nightgown and her sheets, stares as he comprehends its meaning. He stares as he wars with himself how to react:

_comfort her, she needs you_

_why would I give a damn what she needs_

_you know how much she's always wanted a child_

_and for the first time in sixteen years I'm going to thank God, because oh thank God that she still doesn't have a child_

_she's survived worse by herself, she can survive this too, by tomorrow it'll only be a faintly gleaming memory in the back of her smiling gaze_

_that's only because she's become too good at smiling without feeling the smile upon her face_

_just hold her just move over slight just take her in your arms and_

He bolts to his feet to leave. He didn't come in here for pointless coddling and comforting syllables. If one is to learn how to live, one must realize that the world is vicious and comforting syllables only delay its sting, not eliminate it. Nellie Lovett already knows this, anyway, since she's lived this long. He must simply let her weather through this alone.

As he crosses to her door, for the first time all evening, Nellie pivots her eyes towards him – and even though his back is to her, even though the gesture of eyes raising makes not a sound, Sweeney feels it like an electric current across a wire, erupting through his bones, but he does not turn around.

Nellie stares at his back, at the taut muscles bulging beneath his white shirt, translucent in the soft moonlight, wondering if he remembers that night sixteen years ago, or if he's forgotten, or if he refuses to remember, refuses to remember that night and the pain and their moment forever branded into their flesh –

He turns around and looks at her.

"Was there a lot of blood?" he asks, as though still commenting on a subject with no more weight than the weather.

"A lot of blood," says Nellie, lips numb and cold from disuse. "So much blood – too much – "

Then she collapses into sobs. She can't remain a statue any longer; she can't hide from him that she is broken any longer. She shudders with shock and despair and joy as she feels his weight again sink into the space beside her on the mattress, their legs touching, and wraps his arms around her.

He will not tell her that it's all going to be okay; he will not lie to her, at least not if they both know it's untrue. So instead, he will merely hug her close and murmur into her hair and wish that he could feel delighted at finally watching the woman that never does anything but annoy him suffer.

Because, for some stupid reason, he can't.

He draws away. She stares up at him, expecting something, and he thinks he should say something but he has nothing to say that would ease her pain, nothing to say that would bring a smile to her face or erase the past. Nothing to say that any thrown-together words could ever hope to accomplish.

Sweeney grips her hands in his, leans forward, and rests a kiss upon her hairline.

His lips linger a second longer than befits a man who claims he died long ago, a second longer than necessary.

When he pulls away, by an unspoken agreement, they both stand. Their hands are still clasped, their flesh pressing into each other.

A smile trembles like a ripple in a pond across Nellie's lips. "You didn't forget."

"No, Nellie," he says, and her heart trembles like her lips to hear that most beloved word on his lips, to know that sixteen years ago was not the first and last time she would ever hear it from his lips, "I didn't."

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**A/N:** Reviews are love. Love is life. Life is a nice thing to have. So are virtual cookies. Ergo, you should review.


	23. Distortion

30 Kisses #9: dash.

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"G'afternoon, love!"

Sweeney, standing post by his window, did not immediately turn to her. She would come in whether he feigned interest in whatever had brought her upstairs in the first place or not, so it was easier to just not react to her boisterous appearances.

But when loud _clump_s began sounding from behind him, he could not help but turn his head over his shoulder: his landlady was tussling with a rectangular box taller than she; the _clump_s reverberated each time it slipped in her grasp and hit the floor.

"Look what I bought for you at the market," called Nellie from somewhere behind the box as she wrestled it inside his shop. "Jesus, it's heavy – well, don't just stand there ogling, Mr. T, be a gentleman for once and help me out – "

How she had even managed to walk here from the market, he could not imagine. Rolling his eyes, he strolled towards her, hefted one end of the package into his arms, and aided her in setting it in the center of the room beside his barber chair.

"Wait 'til you see," Nellie babbled, tearing as excitedly at the box as a child at Christmas, "it's just lovely, and you've needed one for so long . . ." Opening the top, she reached inside and pulled out her newly purchased item, beaming.

"A mirror?" said Sweeney, staring.

It was Nellie's turn to roll her eyes. "Yes, good job, dear, it is _indeed_ a mirror. A new, nice, pricey, full-length mirror, mind you."

"Why?" he asked.

"Why? You gone blind there, love? Your old one's broken. It's been needing replacement for years now."

"It still functions."

She stared at him as though he'd just sprouted a new brain atop his head – or as if his current one had disappeared altogether. "Sorry?"

"My old mirror. It still functions – you can still see yourself."

She snorted and strode over to his damaged mirror, glaring skeptically into her reflection. "Yeah, sure, you can still see yourself – a craggy and warped yourself." She pivoted around, frowning at him now rather than the image of herself. "What're you so sullen about anyway, love? It's a present – you should be thanking me, not getting all critical of my gift-picking skills. Look, this's a perfectly lovely new mirror what doesn't make you look like you've got cracks all over your skin, and it's high time your old one – "

"Why did you break it?" questioned Sweeney.

Her face crimsoned with fury. "Jesus Christ, what're you on about now? I didn't break your mirror, you fool – why the hell would I break something if I wanted to buy a new one? It'd make far more sense to pawn off an old – and whole, mind you – mirror, then use that money to pay for a new one, if I were really aching to put a new mirror in your room . . . but I didn't even have enough funds to feed myself, nevermind buy new mirrors, when this one here broke – "

"The mirror wasn't broken when I was deported," said Sweeney, his eyes not wavering from hers. Her cheeks burned an even deeper scarlet. He knew he should cease – knew her anger was nearing danger point – but she was hiding something from him, and he wanted to know why. "It cracked between my departure and my return. And if I am truly the first person to live here in fifteen years – "

"You honestly think I'd lie to you 'bout that?" she demanded, the lips of her frown curling apart to reveal gritted teeth.

" – you must have been the one to break it."

"I'm telling you, Todd, I didn't – "

"Mirrors do not break on their own, my dear."

Nellie let out a harsh laugh and threw her arm in the direction of his old mirror. "On the contrary, love, they do – one what did's standing right in front of you."

"You're a terrible liar, pet."

The furious curl of her lips vanished; the throbbing blood so close to bursting through the skin of her cheeks siphoned away and left her face white; the fire in her eyes smothered.

Then the fury returned, tenfold of before, as scalding lava flooded her veins and set her cheeks burning and spine trembling. "Alright, fine – you want me to tell you? You want me to stop trying to protect you from the pain? Well, I guess you're right – I guess there's no protection in such a shitty world, so I might as well tell you flat out."

"I – " Sweeney started, bewildered by her sudden anger, but she would not let him finish.

"So you want me to tell you how it broke? You want me to tell you how your precious Lucy wasn't always the perfect, even-tempered little angel you like to believe?"

"Lucy never would've – "

" – broken a mirror?" she finished for him, flourishing a travesty of a pitying grin. "Think again, love."

"You're lying," he said immediately.

"Oh?" said Nellie, her grin spreading across her face, more like an infectious disease than happiness: endured only because it must be. "You think so? But I thought I was a_ terrible_ liar. I thought I could never pull a single thing past _you_ – "

Her words cut off with a gasp as he seized her around the neck.

They both froze. She froze with incredulity that he could – and seemed truly ready to – end her life with only a slight tightening of his fingers, that she was just as dispensable to him as any other human who crossed through his shop.

He froze with horror at how the image of himself shown more clearly and accurately in the back of her dark eyes than any mirror – cracked or otherwise – would ever reveal to him, at the image of the monster he had become.

"It's just an old mirror, love," she whispered.

His fingers dropped from her neck and to his side; Nellie sucked at the air gratefully, massaging her throat.

She was right. It wasn't as though Lucy pulverizing a mirror was as severe as her pulverizing a person: the idea of she being anywhere near as demonic as he caused the hairs on his arms to stand on end. A mirror, however – well, it was just a mirror. Just a silly inanimate object.

And yet. . . . His mind could not even conjure the image of his Lucy hurtling something at the mirror and watching it crack. He could not conjure the image of his Lucy ever desiring to break anything, inanimate or not.

Softly, he reached out and touched Nellie's cheek. Her eyes shifted to his, narrow and distrusting, her fingers still rubbing her throat, her cheeks still scorching with lingering splotches of lava.

"Please," he said, brushing his knuckles over her face, eyes for once unguarded, pleading, "tell me what happened."

He could not forge an apology with his lips: those were not words he knew how to say, nor even form. This – this cry in his gaze, this fleeting tender gesture, this silent confession of pain and support – was the best he could do.

Her hand reached up and gripped his fingers in hers. Her mouth squirmed, rational mind beating against her gesture and her acceptance – but her hand remained closed around his, unmoving.

He stepped backwards slowly, his fingers in hers, guiding her with him. When the back of his legs bumped into his barber chair, he sat, pulling her down into his lap.

She perched on the very edge of his knees for a moment, moving no further towards him, lips stretched tight across her face. The man had very nearly killed her – and she was just going to crawl back into his arms as though nothing had happened? And she prided herself on being a strong person who never groveled or caved in or depended on anyone?

She turned her gaze to Sweeney. He returned the look but did not move, did not try to persuade her again with words or caresses. This had to be her decision.

Swallowing a strangled keen, she fell against his body and secured her arms about his waist, just as they both had known she eventually would. She cozied into him, her chest pressed to his, her head underneath his chin, shivering with delight as he lazily draped his left arm over her back and buried his right hand in her curls.

If this was caving in, she decided, then she would be more than happy to completely collapse.

"It happened sometime after Turpin's little party and before Lucy's – before she swallowed the arsenic," she began, tightening her grip on Sweeney when she felt him shudder in her embrace. "It – those weren't a pretty few weeks. Lucy was always on edge, always crying or shouting – or worse, making no sound, not moving at all, just sitting on the bed with her hands folded in her lap. . . .

"Now, you might remember that baby Johanna was quite fond of your razors. Didn't know what they were, of course, but she liked watching them gleam in the light."

She felt his head nod quietly atop her skull; he was not aware of the motion, he was lost in the sudden recollection of five pearly white teeth grinning at him from above a razor fisted in stubborn, chubby fingers.

"Well, Lucy couldn't stand that. She was convinced that Johanna was going to kill herself with 'em one day, so she usually kept a pretty firm eye on what Johanna's hands were grasping for.

"But little Jo had a lot more unsupervised time during those weeks. One day, when Lucy wasn't paying attention, she grabbed a razor and cut herself – not deep," she amended hastily at his sharp intake of breath, "just a scratch, really, a little thing on her thumb, but you know how fingers bleed so. And Lucy – she went into hysterics, screaming her head off about how dangerous razors were and how stupid Johanna was and how she'd made the floor all dirty . . ."

Sweeney closed his eyes. His mind was no longer having difficulty conjuring images – and he wished suddenly that it still would have difficulty. He did not want to see Lucy shrieking, he did not want to see her calling their little lamb stupid, he did not want to see her porcelain skin dirtied red the way his was . . .

Nellie swallowed, wondering if she should continue, wondering why she had let him persuade her in the first place:

Some things were simply better left unknown.

"Well, I'd been down in my shop, but I came running soon's I heard all the yelling. I started shouting at Lucy, saying it – it wasn't Johanna what was stupid, it was her for not watching her baby properly – for neglecting her responsibility as a mother . . . and she started shouting back, of course – demanding how could I know, I'd never had everything I loved tossed out the window in one go – and I'd never been a mother neither . . . and it escalated . . . and then she lost control and dashed the razor in her fist at the mirror."

She lifted her head from the nook beneath his chin. He stared straight ahead, eyes as glassy and focused upon nothing as the corpses she cut into every day.

"Love?" she breathed, but he still did not move. Softly, she reached out and touched his cheek –

And suddenly found herself sitting on the floor.

She tilted her head upward and watched him stride, his gait as purposefully straight as a somnambulist's, towards the mirror. The old mirror.

"I'm keeping it," came his whispered declaration.

"What? But you're – it's – " she struggled to her feet " – love, it's broken – "

"I know."

" – but – I bought you a new one – "

He touched his fingers to the reflector and ran them slowly along the cracks, imprinting the jagged lines and the stories they each told into his skin. "Keep it for yourself."

" – but I don't – " she teetered towards him, her gait as precariously wobbling as a drunkard, stopping just slightly behind him so both of their bodies were reflected in the mirror's surface " – I don't need a new mirror – I'm – mine's whole – and didn't you – didn't you hear any of what I just – "

"I heard everything, Mrs. Lovett."

"So why would you want to keep something that holds nothing but pain?" she demanded, a lingering convulsion of fury exploding through her veins and driving her spine straight and upright.

"I want to hold pain," said Sweeney, his eyes riveted to the mirror, his fingers memorizing the cracks the way a man memorizes his lover's body, "if it's her pain."

Nellie stared at their distorted reflections in the mirror, at his intent focus upon the crater and grooves of the mirror, at her gaping jaw of fury and hatred and astonishment –

And yet, too, in her reflection, she saw expectation. As though she had always somehow known this would be the result of her purchasing a new mirror. As though she had always known he could no more crawl away from his dirty window than his broken mirror:

He no longer knew how to view a world that was not perverted by crevices of pain. A world in which not everything was distorted.

As her body dashed out of his shop, she kicked his new mirror onto the floor, not waiting to watch it shatter.

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**A/N:** Happy Christmas, m'dears. Celebrate with me by leaving a review? ;]


	24. Smiles in the Light

30 Kisses #15: perfect blue; fanfic50 #33: communication.

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**A/N:** An alternate universe.

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"Mr. T, for God's sake," Nellie wheezes as she stumbles up beside him and comes to a halt, bending over with her hands pressed against her knees, chest surging as she sucks at the air. "You've got to stop sneaking out in the goddamned middle of the night to do this!"

Sweeney does not so much as spare her a glance: his attention is riveted, as always, to the window two stories above where he stands. His posture is as straight and perfect as a soldier, all sharp lines and angles save for the curve of his neck, craned upward so as to allow his eyes better access to the window.

Not that there is anything to see within the window at the moment. Not that he cares if there is or not; he will keep vigil until his reason for waiting does appear, or even if the reason does not appear.

She finds his desperate hope that something will appear at the window frustrating. She finds his insistence to wait for what will never be pathetic.

(She finds it beautiful that he is so loyal, so loving, even through his armor forged of ice. Even if his love is not for her.)

She finds this same frustrating, pathetic, loyal quality in herself. Perhaps that's why his makes her so furious.

She touches his arm and tries to tug him away, but he jerks from her grasp. Swearing under her breath, she sidles closer to where he stands in the alleyway, concealed behind nothing: were anyone to peer down through the windows that his gaze is currently cemented to, they would see the pair with ease.

"Mr. Todd – look – I understand that you're hurting, love – but you've got to come to your senses about this eventually . . ."

Still no reaction from her companion. Nellie grits her teeth and fights against a flood of anger, heart banging like a fist against her rib cage: what more can she say to the man that she has not already said for the past month? How many more times does he need to hear the words before they sink in? Or are her words as useless as a child's Knurr ball, smacking against a stick and then bouncing away, never to return or even make the slightest impact upon the bat?

Again she grasps his arm; again he pulls away.

"This is spying, Mr. Todd," Nellie hisses, standing on her tiptoes to lean as close as she can to his ear, "and if we're caught – and if you're recognized – "

"I want to be recognized," whispers Sweeney. The first words he's spoken to her all night.

Nellie gapes at him for a moment before recovering the ability of speech. "Have you lost your marbles? You do realize that you were sent off to bloody Australia for_ life_, yeah? And that if anyone realizes you escaped, you'd be sent back there without a backwards glance, or maybe even executed for breaking your 'rightful' sentence – but if you keep on standing outside Turpin's house like this night after night, love, I'm not seeing any other futures for you – you're practically asking to be sent back if you keep this up – "

"I want her to recognize me," says Sweeney, turning his eyes downward and sideways to meet hers. The first time he's looked at her all night.

Her heart lodges in her throat.

His eyes are wide, darkly earnest, so black they are the same color as the starless night sky above them, so black it is only because she can see the white peripheries gleaming at her does she know he is looking into her eyes.

Nellie swallows her heart, forcing it back down to its rightful home in her chest. "And what'll that accomplish, love?"

The whites of his eyes disappear for the span of an instance. A blink.

"She didn't recognize you last week at the market. She didn't recognize you when Turpin came for a shave last month. And even if she did recognize you . . ." Nellie swallows again even though her heart remains in her chest, even though there is so much saliva in her mouth she thinks she is on the verge of being sick, terrified of his reaction but knowing she must speak while he is actually listening: "Even if she did recognize you . . . what do you expect to happen?"

"She'll come back," says Sweeney, but it is more a growl of accusation than a statement of certainty, more the prayer of an atheist than the proclamation of a king. "We'll be together again."

"Really? You expect the woman what left a mere barber for a hoity toity judge to _leave _that judge for an escaped convict?"

Something lashes through his body like a whip, tearing through his muscles in a convulsion and ripping a cry from his throat; she winces, bracing herself for the brunt of his violence, but he does not strike her, merely snarls, "Lucy didn't leave me. I was taken away."

"And she wed the man what took you away."

"He must've – forced her to marry him . . . or lied about why I was sent away . . . or – "

"Or she saw that she had better prospects waiting for her," said Nellie, "and went ahead and took 'em."

That mysterious force lashes through his body again, but it is more the shudder of a dying animal than the lash of a strong, defiant man this time.

"It wasn't by choice," he mutters feverishly. "Lucy never would have married him by choice, without he forcing her – "

"You can't force that, love," she says, nodding up at the window two stories above them.

Sweeney whips his head back around, neck arcing backwards to again study the window, the whites of his eyes shining in earnest attention – where, at last, his reason stands.

Lucy Turpin's yellow locks splay down her shoulders as she combs out her nonexistent snarls. Her face is pressed to the panes, porcelain skin squished prettily against the glass; her eyes sparkle up at the night sky; her body is cloaked in a nightgown of perfect blue silk, a far more luxurious color and material than her husband of fifteen years ago could ever have afforded. Her mouth smiles as though she does not notice there are no stars in the sky tonight, as though she does not need to search the sky for a reason to smile.

Beside Nellie, Sweeney's physique is taut as a wire, his body heat hot as hell.

A hand snakes into view and brushes across Lucy's cheek, causing her smile to brighten and her body to pivot. Nellie catches only a glimpse of a scarlet waistcoat and a satisfied smirk before the smirk disappears against her smile – then both figures are obscured by Lucy's hair, flooding down her shoulders and back like a golden waterfall.

Turpin and his wife pull apart. Then, the smiles reappearing, they vanish from view, leaving the barber and the baker with nothing to watch but the empty glass panes.

Nellie risks a glance at Sweeney: the whites of his eyes shine with tears, but they remain upon the window above, still desperately hoping, still loyal to a purpose that abandoned him, still waiting for what will never be.

Rather than a flood of fury surging through her veins, the flood this time is of sorrow – of irrational guilt at being unable to alleviate his pain – of a wish to cure them both of this incurable disease that both destroys and gives the will to live.

Before she knows what she's done, Nellie grasps Sweeney's face between her palms and bruises his mouth with a kiss.

She starts to draw away the instant her conscious mind catches hold of her body and realizes what she's done, what she never should have done, the hate and the anger he will feel for her, asking the love he can never give her –

His hands close in her hair and around her waist, cementing her to him.

His fingers yank at her curls and force her head back to deepen the kiss, nails digging into her side, clutching at her so firmly it's as though he fears her escape if he loosens his hold – or perhaps he fears his own escape, fears that he'll disappear entirely if he does not allow himself to cling to what still can be – to what still _is_ . . .

"Thank you," he whispers against her lips when they part.

Confusedly, dizzily, lovingly, she nuzzles her nose against his neck.

"For what?" she whispers in return, but he does not reply, and she does not need him to.

Without a word, through silent understanding even without the use of speech or being able to see anything but the whites of eyes, they twine their arms and stride away, the glass panes and the night sky shining emptily above them.

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**A/N:** Reviews are love.


	25. You Win

30 Kisses #6: space between dream and reality.

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"Ain't you going to come up here and get me, Mr. T?"

Sweeney jerked his head upward. His breath stuck in his throat and he had to push it in and out sharply before he could utter a word: "Mrs. Lovett – what the hell're you – "

"Well, either you come up here," she said, giggling as she swung her legs back and forth, "or you catch me when I jump. It's a simple choice, really."

Sweeney stood at the base of a willow tree. The willow sat upon the edge of a cliff that plunged off into nothing, nothing but the ocean waves miles and miles below.

And Nellie Lovett perched atop one of the tree's tallest branches.

"But I really don't think the second choice – you catching me, I mean – is a good idea," she continued with the air of a diplomat, coolly collected about the subject at hand, as if it had no personal impact upon her.

Her legs swung like pendulums over the water and her pale skin glowed beneath sun rays made silver by scheming storm clouds. She placed her hands on the bough she sat upon and leaned backwards leisurely, her chin tipping down to allow her eyes to meet his, red curls dangling across her face with the same haphazard insistency as her willow.

He shoved another breath through his nose.

"Not that I don't fancy you strong and capable enough to catch me, love." Lovett's words floated through the airs like bubbles, light and easy, a maddening paradox to the barrage in his head. "Only it's a pretty far fall and such a distance'd add a lot of strain – y'know, gravity and acceleration and whatever."

Her left leg, still swinging alongside its companion, began to twist around, ankle rolling, toes churning, until the shoe was set free. It fell into the ocean, rotating like a pinwheel in its descent.

He would not show emotion. He would remain indifferent. She wasn't serious. She was only doing this to get a reaction from him – and if there was anything Sweeney Todd hated in this world, it was giving Nellie Lovett what she wanted.

"What are you doing up there?" he asked without inflection.

"Isn't it obvious?" Her left leg resumed its normal swinging pace; her right leg began to wiggle, gyrating in her hip socket. "I'm taking a plunge."

"The fall will kill you," said Sweeney matter-of-factly.

She slanted further back, curls dancing like flames over her eyes. "Yes," she agreed, observing the space between she and the ocean, "yes, it would."

He forced his clenched fingers to relax. She was horsing around, he reminded himself, she wouldn't actually jump, she only wanted him to get riled.

Besides, even if she were serious – why should he care what she did with her life? It was _her_ life, after all, not his.

"Do you want to die, Mrs. Lovett?"

"Oh, I want to live, love, rest assured of that."

"So climb down."

"God, no!"

He tightened his jaw and squinted against the metallic rays of the sun into her face. She inclined back even further, body nearly parallel to the ground; he forcibly slammed air through his nostrils.

"If you fall," he said, "you'll die."

"See, I don't like your narrow-minded viewpoint there," said Lovett. She swerved backwards until her body no longer lay parallel to the ground but perpendicular, her skull reaching towards the ocean, her weeping willow tresses fanning over her beloved briny, and his mouth opened to shout despite that he could no longer breathe much less shout – but she didn't fall. She stayed put, head pointing to the water, hands and feet wrapped around her branch like a monkey.

"After all, whose to say I won't be any less alive after I die, hmm?" she queried buoyantly.

"There's no coming back from death."

"Never said there was, love."

Logic had abandoned the conversation, Sweeney concluded, lips a tight line across his face. "Mrs. Lovett, if you want to remain alive, climb down."

"Climb up here and get me."

"You obviously got up there – you can get down."

"Well, yeah, certainly I _can_ – but I won't. Either you come get me, or . . ." She freed one hand momentarily to let a fingerless black glove plummet into the sea.

A cold panic settled over Sweeney like snow. She would not sacrifice one of her gloves only for show. This wasn't just her usual theatrical performance with no reality behind the staging. She was serious. She was going to kill herself.

His stomach knotted. Nellie Lovett, annoy him though she might, wasn't a dime a dozen; not many women would happily comply with a cannibalistic business partnership. Who would bake the pies to conceal his victims? Who would chop the men into little pieces and grind them up until they were tender and juicy? Who would toil up and down steep steps and slave over a boiling oven and _look at a monster like me with love in her eyes_ –

"Don't be ridiculous," said Sweeney. "If I come up there and have to carry you down, I'll likely fall – and then we'll both kill ourselves."

"C'mon up, love – can't wait here all day," she said in a sing-song voice, as though she hadn't heard him, wavering back and forth from her upside-down position giddily, an exhilarated crimson flushing her cheeks.

"What difference does it make if I come get you or if you climb down yourself?" he demanded.

"All the difference," said Lovett, suddenly serious, blood and life pounding in her cheeks. "The difference of if you care enough to stop me from killing myself and forcing me to survive – or if you couldn't give a shit if I live or die."

He inhaled, slow and deep, letting the steady flow of oxygen calm him.

"Of course I'd give a shit if you killed yourself," he growled, carefully.

Her other glove dropped into the sea. "Prove it."

"_Mrs. Lovett,"_ shouted Sweeney, _"we'd both die if I do."_

Not that he valued his own life all that greatly – but he could not allow Lucy to go unavenged and Turpin to continue to walk free.

"Well, either way," said Lovett, swinging side to side, the moment of solemnity dissipated into insouciant nonchalance again, "I win."

"What – "

"You try and catch me, or climb up to get me, then we both die – that proves you care. And then we both wind up in hell – together."

The word _together _slid like chocolate from her lips, blissful, something to be savored. He shuddered.

"You don't try to catch me or come up this here tree," she continued, "then that proves you don't care – which I already know, of course . . . but even then, we still get to dwell in hell together – because there's no chance you'll ever join Lucy and her little angels in heaven."

Blood flooded his head and hammered against his temples, forging a sheen of red in front of his vision. _"How dare you – "_

"How dare I what? Speak the truth?" She craned her neck backwards and threw him a grin: from where he stood, looking at her upside-down, her grin looked like a frown, corners stretching towards the sea. "So what'll it be, love?" She drummed her gloveless hands upon the branch. "Last call."

Sweeney curled his fingers into fists, nails stabbing into his palms, and shoved them inside his pockets. "The call is yours, Lovett. Not mine."

She shrugged. "As you say."

Her hands and her feet unpeeled from the branch and she fell – and despite his words, despite his vindictive joy at crushing her last hopes of he loving her, despite his immobile stance and his rigid demeanor and his _those eyes dammit those eyes please fuck no don't Jesus Christ don't let those eyes close for the last time_ – despite all that, his legs surged forward to peer over the edge –

She was nowhere in sight.

He leaped off the cliff without pausing to consider how far away it was to the water, or how such a tumble would likely break his neck, or how he did not care what happened to her.

For a breathless moment, his body was airborne, his arms and legs outstretched like a bird, immobile, suspended in time and space –

Then he plummeted, the ocean rushing up to meet him, and slammed into the water.

The plunge knocked the breath out of him; he lay there for a long moment, sinking, gasping – but he could not simply lie there gasping, there was nothing to breathe with his nostrils and his mouth submerged in water – he needed to contain what little air he had, not search for more where none was to be found –

He held his remaining breath inside his lungs and squinted his eyes against the salty liquid. Fifteen feet away, a dark mass sank. Even in the murky depths, her willow tree tresses glowed like fire.

He dove for her, arms and legs fighting through the dense ocean water, airways aching, and grabbed her around the waist. She in his arms somehow made him airy, lighter: they floated upwards and broke the surface within moments. Swallowing large amounts of oxygen, he dragged both of their bodies to the shore.

"Alright, Lovett," he growled, throwing he and she upon the ground, shivering and shuddering, face pressed into the sand, wheezing into the grains, "I hope you're satisfied."

No answer.

He lifted his head to look at the form sprawled next to him:

Her body did not move. Her eyes did not open.

"Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett." Each call of her name aided a tap to the arm, a shake of the shoulder.

Each call went unheeded.

"Mrs. Lovett."

His air passages constricted as though they had again been submerged in water. His limbs felt heavy, bloated, water-logged, dead. Defeated.

"Mrs. Lovett!"

He poked and slapped and screamed through lungs that had withered long ago. She stayed stagnant, silent, the way he had so often wished she would be – ceasing to bother him, ceasing to press against him, touch him, kiss him, talk to him, insist he feed himself, try to make him human –

" – Mrs. Love – Lah – Lovett – !"

He couldn't breathe. He gasped, choked, pawed at the air. Breath wouldn't come. Or, if breath came, it refused to stay.

"_Nellie . . ."_

He bent his head and pressed his lips to hers, inhaling, slow and deep, gluttonous for any bit of oxygen left in her deceased lungs –

He reeled back, spluttering, as Lovett's eyes and mouth opened wide, cheerfully crooked teeth on display in a grotesque travesty of a smile.

"I win," she told him as he knelt there, shaking, gasping, uncomprehending.

Then she began to cackle, the laughter horrible and piercing and continuous. Her laughter reverberated in the grains of sand, in his limbs. He covered his ears and tightened his muscles but still the volume increased, the reverberating increased, the echoing _"I win"_ and the grinning mouth and the eyes wide open but dead forever, her eyes dead forever, those eyes that dared to look at the beauty inside him that not even he could see dead forever –

Sweeney's eyes bolted open and his body bolted upright.

His barbershop ceiling hung above him. His bedcovers lay puddled on the floor. His pillow rested atop the heap of blankets. His clothes clung to his physique with sweat.

He did not sleep the rest of the night. Not for lack of trying. He couldn't.

He should have known it was a dream from the start: the lack of explanation for how either of them had ended up at such a place, or why a tree would sit upon the edge of a cliff, or how scrawny little Mrs. Lovett had climbed that high in the first place; the disregard for reality in terms of neither of their necks breaking in the plunge, or his lungs not bursting from lack of oxygen within the ocean.

The dream shouldn't disturb him. He knew that. He knew that, because he knew he wouldn't care if Lovett died; she was as dispensable as the rest. Yet each time he again closed his eyes, there was her mouth, grinning, as wide as a jack-o-lantern's, as painfully bright as the sun's.

He felt like a fool. No, he was a fool. What but a fool would allow himself to be so agitated by a mere dream? What but a fool would not have recognized that such ridiculous scenery, such a ridiculous situation, and most of all such ridiculous emotions, were not real?

He did not receive any customers the next day. He did not accept any food from Lovett and she did not allow him to drink any ale or gin if he refused to eat, so he went without nourishment for well over twelve hours.

Finally, as the moon began to rise into the dark sky, he could stand it no longer, and clomped down his stairs into her shop.

From where she stood at the sink with Toby, she yelped, "I win!"

In the doorway, Sweeney's body became paralyzed.

Her eyes swung towards the door, pupils dancing with mischievous glee and curls of fire dancing with vitality. A smile appeared on her face when she saw her tenant. Toby, looking once at Sweeney and then at Lovett, frowned, then left the room in annoyance.

"Why, hello there, love," said Nellie Lovett as he approached. "Nice to see you again. I'm guessing you've finally relented and're wanting something to eat – "

His fingers seizing her wrist cut her words short with a gasp. Her dancing eyes stilled and darkened; her dancing curls became arrested in place, in disarray all about her head, one lock apprehended upon the bridge of her nose, just between her two eyes.

He leaned towards her, their noses less than an inch apart, close enough for a kiss.

"You win what?" he hissed.

"Just . . ." Her eyes resumed dancing, but not with glee. "Just me and Toby playing a game – we always play little games while we clean up for the night and he didn't – I finished washing my stack of dishes before he did, is all – that's all I won . . ."

Her mouth pulled into a grin, tentative but firm, lips parted slightly to reveal the edges of cheerfully crooked teeth, yearning for him to grin with her, be happy with her.

"Well, actually," she told him, "I always win."

Sweeney threw her arm from him but kept his face near hers, near enough for her to feel the whispered words on her lips louder than she could hear them:

"You will _never_ win."

Then he jerked back from her – face twisting to the side, spine twisting like a snake so his torso hovered perpendicular to his hips rather than parallel, everything twisting away from her as though slapped by the words she had not spoken – and bolted from her shop.

His feet thundered on the steps as he raced against no one back to his shop, pounding through his body and within the walls of the room where he had left her, where she still stood.

Her face remained turned towards where he no longer stood; her lips remained parted in the forgotten remembrance of a grin.

"I know, love," she whispered. "Neither of us can win. But we're both still playing."

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**A/N:** Wrote this one to force myself out of a particularly bad bout of writer's block. Not sure what to make of it.

But, as always, reviews are love.


	26. Hide

Prompt #18: say ahh.

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I listen to the sounds of you awakening from sleep every morning.

You don't ever allow me to spend the night by your side. You like to pretend that your eyes are never closed in slumber. To have someone sleep beside you is to trust that someone not to hurt you at your most naked, your most vulnerable, even more so than the act of making love; to let someone see you with your eyes closed is to let them see you at your most human moment possible.

I wish you would let me spend the night by your side, but I do not protest. I indulge your delusion of invincibility, just as I indulge you in so much, because I am a glutton for whatever precious little scraps you throw in my direction, because I cannot risk losing even these scraps. So I am only ever privy to listen to you awakening, never to viewing. Nonetheless, I envision your routine as clearly as if I was beside you, sprawled upon your mattress and allowed to drink in the sight of your Grecian body as much as I like, and not on the floor below, standing in my kitchen and slapping my rolling pin against dough.

Nonetheless, I eliminate one of your indulgences today. One I should have never granted you in the first place.

I listen to the sound of your mattress' springs _whoosh_ing as you roll onto your back, disentangling yourself from unconsciousness, then to its _creak_ing as you push yourself to a standing pose. I listen to the sound of your feet _thud_ding against the timeworn floor and crossing the room. I listen to the sound of your wardrobe _wheez_ing its doors open then _wheez_ing them shut again. I listen to the sound of your nightshirt _vsssh_ing as it drops against the floor, then the _vsssh_ing of your trousers and day shirt upon your skin as they are pulled on. I listen to the sound of your feet _thud_ding against the timeworn floor again as you cross over to your bureau, my body tensing:

Because I know that the usual _snick_ing of your razor being revealed to the world will not come.

I listen to the sound of your silence. A silence longer than even you normally are capable of enduring.

Then comes an unfamiliar sound: a _crash_. I wince and beat my rolling pin harder than necessary into the dough.

But the crash is just a prelude. Soon comes a torrent of _smash_es, _plonk_s, _thump_s, _knock_s, _boom_s, _fsssh_s, _clang_s, _whump_s, _pow_s, _slam_s, _buff_s, _khlop_s, _chhhk_s, _bang_s, a symphony of destruction too clamorous to distinguish individual instruments or chords.

I close my eyes as your thunderous opus continues on the floor above. I tell myself not to panic. I prepared myself for an upset; I knew this would not be easy.

But it will be fine. Everything will be fine. You just need some time to adjust, that's all. I must remain firm in the meantime and not hand back your indulgence. I must not break. This ravaging of your home and yourself in search of what I have taken from you will end eventually, as soon as you realize what you have lost will not be returned and that you do not need such an indulgence to live. This period of destruction will climax and lead to serenity.

My wait will be worth it.

Your orchestra of throwings and pushings and breakings continues into the morning, an unending drone in my ears and cannonade in my walls. Customers ask questions and give me strange looks; I fib up something about our cat catching rabies and being locked upstairs for the protection of us all until we can work up the heart to shoot it.

An hour later, your concert ends.

My hands still. I tilt my head towards the ceiling, waiting for it to resume.

It doesn't. It doesn't resume in a minute, nor ten. It doesn't resume in one hour, nor two – nor all day. I do not keep still all this time, of course – I continue in the shop as usual, chatting up customers and selling pies – but I keep waiting.

And you keep your silence.

I refuse to rush up the stairs to your shop and check on you, only venturing up once at midday to deposit your lunch upon the balcony (noting with a thrill of terrified hope that your 'closed' sign hangs from the door), for you will notice if I break this routine of delivering meals and then you will suspect me. I wonder if I should enter your shop to try and help you, but I am afraid. Not of getting caught in the storm of your anger, but of getting caught in your pain. Of relenting on what I had vowed to do and indulging you yet again.

No. I will hold firm.

As the dinner rush at my shop begins to wind down, allowing me to prepare supper for us, you appear in my doorway.

I nearly solidify right where I am – grater in one hand and bread in the other – but force myself to inhale and continue grinding the bread, letting the crumbs fall into a bowl. "G'evening, love. I'm afraid dinner's not quite ready yet, but you're welcome to sit here and wait – you could dine down here with me and Toby, for once, 'stead of all by your lonesome upstairs – "

_Slam._

I glance up: you've stepped out of the doorway just enough to let the door fall closed, body rigid and taut. Eyes upon me.

"Well, sit down, make yourself comfy," I say as I brush the last of the bread crumbs into the bowl and bustle to the cupboards.

_Thud, thud. Thud, thud._ I don't need to look at you to know the sound of your approaching footsteps, even and firm, always in matched sets of painfully slow twos.

I rummage around a bit before finding what I'm looking for: sugar, flour, and salt. "I'm making suet dumplings tonight, how's that sound? – we haven't had 'em in a while, so I figured it'd be a nice – "

I spin around and nearly slam into your body, inches away from mine. I gasp and reflexively jerk backwards, slamming into the counter instead, wincing.

"Jesus, love," I pant, clutching the ingredients to my chest, "y'could try announcing your presence when you come up behind me like that, eh? Didn't realize you was that close."

Unconcerned with my distress, you look down at me, eyes lusterless, mouth a single hard cut across your face.

"My razors are missing, Mrs. Lovett," you say.

"I – missing?" I say as I dive around you and return to my counter, setting the items upon its surface, rubbing a hand over the small of my back in pain. "What d'you mean? What're you talking about?"

"Missing," you say from behind me. "Gone."

Gritting my teeth, I resume cooking, adding the sugar and salt to my mixture of chopped suet, beaten eggs, and grated bread. "That – that just can't be, love – you never leave them out of your sight. I'm sure they're around your shop somewhere – "

"They're not."

" – nonsense, darling – " I pat flour over my hands " – you must've just misplaced them – "

"I didn't."

" – well – don't fret – " I began to work my hands into the concoction, forming it into little balls " – I know they'll turn up soon – "

"They won't."

" – really, love, this's silly – " I continue shaping the dumplings, praying that I can keep up this façade, trying not to worry about the fact that I cannot see nor hear what you are doing as you stand immobile behind me " – it's not as if your razors could've walked off on their own, after all – "

"They're gone."

" – well – and even if your razors are gone – " I bite my lip, wondering if it's too soon to say it to you, knowing that this will either break you or restore you " – 's'not the end of the world, love – you can always take up a new profession, or buy new ones – "

No reply.

I pluck a bit of dumpling between my fingers. "Here, love, have a taste of this 'fore I pop them into the oven to see if it's any good." Grinning, I begin to turn to you. "Say 'ahhh' – "

Fingertips descend upon the back of my neck before I can even start to pivot in your direction. My hands still and my breath catches: how did I not hear the _thud_ding sounds of your approach?

Your body presses against mine: your torso pushing into my back, your legs arcing against my legs, your head beside my head. Your hair fondling my cheeks.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, pet?" you murmur into my ear, teeth grazing over its rim. "For me to buy a new set of blades?"

I swallow my shudder but can't stop my body from instinctively fitting itself against yours. The bit of dumpling plunges, forgotten, onto the floor. "Don't – don't know what you're talking about, love – but if you've lost the old, well, not much else to do but buy some new ones – I'm only being practical here – "

You bite down on my earlobe. I gasp at the exquisite pain and close my eyes. "Love," I protest with my mouth, but my body leans further into your touch, "the customers – someone's going to see us – "

"Yes . . . always being _practical_, aren't you, Mrs. Lovett?" you growl into the side of my throat, as though you did not hear this last remark. Your hand is still at the base of my neck, fingertips indenting my flesh in both pleasure and threat, as your other crawls across my waist. "Simply wasn't _prudent_ for me to obsess so much over those old razors . . . nor _sensible_ of me to regard them as confidants . . ."

"R-right," I pant, relief and joy rising like a tidal wave inside of me. It's working! I never dreamed you would warm so quickly to the idea – it's more than I ever dared hope for . . .

"And what a waste," you whisper, your lips journeying down the length of my throat, your fingers scrabbling up my stomach, scratching tingling patterns along my skin even through the layers of dress and undergarments. "What a _waste_, all that time I spent with them . . ."

My head falls helplessly against your shoulder. "Yes . . ."

Your hand wanders further upward, nearing my bosom; your mouth travels back up my throat, along my jawbone, so close to meeting my lips, as you breathe, "Time that I could have spent with you – "

"Oh, love," I gasp, my eyelids opening – my gaze locking upon yours, eyes inches away from my face – lips inches away from a proper kiss –

A smile ghosts over your face and you tip your head towards mine –

And your wandering hand dives beneath the fabric of my dress and between my breasts.

I yelp and jerk away, clutching my arms over my chest, blurting out, "The customers, Mr. T, for God's – "

But I cut my indignant protests short when I see you laughing. When I realize you know the true reason I lurched out of your arms – a reason that has nothing to do with the customers.

A reason that you now hold in your hand.

"An unusual place to keep a razor, Mrs. Lovett," you muse aloud, cupping your razor in your palm and stroking it lovingly, an embrace for your long parting even though the metal can never embrace you back. "One that certainly never occurred to me, at least."

I swallow down the hard mound forming in my throat: I only tucked the one razor between my breasts because I wanted to have something of you against me all day.

Because I wanted you to stroke me as lovingly as you do those damn blades.

"Where did you stash the others?" you ask, petting your razor with overflowing adoration.

I don't answer.

"Come now, Mrs. Lovett," you say calmly, eyes still upon your beloved _friend_, caressing the thing as intimately as though it were another woman in your bed – as though _this_ woman did not stand two feet away from you. "I will find them eventually – but I think you'd prefer that I didn't demolish your quarters as I did mine while searching."

"Inside one of the pillowcases on my bed," I whisper. "Furthest pillow back on my side of the mattress."

You don't need telling twice: you're out of the room and racing down the corridor before I can so much as blink.

Which is a blessing in disguise, really. Because when I do blink, I can no longer hold back my tears.

I slump against the kitchen counter, body shaking, salt water dripping from my eyes and onto my tray of unbaked suet dumplings.

It had been a stupid idea from the start, taking your razors, I chide myself. There is no place I could conceal them that you wouldn't eventually find. You're as united to those stupid things as to a soulmate: I could stash them halfway across the bloody world and you'd still be able to find them, tied by some inexplicable bond.

Not to mention that it's completely irrational of me to be jealous of inanimate objects, of all things.

The way you treat them is not inanimate though . . . the way you treat them is more human than how you treat me – or yourself.

I shouldn't be mad at you. It's myself I should be mad at – for always letting myself get swept up in your falsehoods. Those tender fingersweeps across my flesh, the murmured words of how you would have rather spent the time with me than your razors – an open admittance of your love for me – everything I ever wanted in the palm of my hand – everything I ever wanted – everything –

_Everything gone . . ._

Your indifference I have made myself immune to. Your deliberate cruelty – your purposefully letting me taste what I yearn for, only to take away not only the wine and the wine glass, but my tongue as well – I have no defense against. No barrier against my teardrops plummeting into our dumplings.

"Mrs. Lovett?"

I jump up in alarm. "Oh! – Mr. T – you again – " I swipe the back of my hand across my eyes, but you have already seen the sobs I normally work so hard to hide. Thinking fast, I flash you a grin and offer the explanation of, "Chopping up a few onions for the dumplings, is all."

You don't grin back. You just look at me, arms secure around your box of friends, mask of apathy twitching as though struggling to comprehend something you have perhaps never realized.

I'm out of ideas for disguising the fact that I've been crying. But maybe, if I just go on as usual, neither of us have to acknowledge it. Maybe we can both pretend that I'm terribly good at hiding both razors and tears – when in truth, I can apparently hide nothing.

Clearing my throat, I resume shaping the conglomeration of ingredients into dumplings, hoping a bit more salt than usual won't spoil the flavor. "Anyway, dinner'll be ready in about three quarters of an hour, love – "

Fingertips descend upon my chin and lift my head up to meet yours across the counter.

Then your lips fall upon mine.

There are no seductive murmurs or caresses this time. No hands wandering over stomach and breasts, no teeth nipping earlobes, no innuendos, no lusting growls into flesh, no lies that I yearn to be truth.

Just one kiss on the lips over a kitchen counter laden with salt water dumplings.

You give me no spoken apology as you leave my kitchen, not even a soul-bearing glance. But as the _thud_s of your footsteps echo upon the stairs leading to your barbershop, I notice that you have left a single razor on my counter, right next to the dumplings.

I open my mouth to call out to you, tell you that you have forgotten a blade, but I close my lips before I make a sound: you would never leave behind one of your friends by accident. This is intentional.

Lips trembling, my fingers close upon your razor and place it between my breasts. My heartbeat _thump_s against your metal skin and it is almost more intimate than having you sleep beside me.

* * *

**A/N:** Reviews are love.


	27. Everything You Ever Wanted

**A/N:** An alternate ending.

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30 Kisses #16: invincible/unrivaled; fanfic50 #48: whisper.

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Sometimes she wished that Sweeney Todd was one of the bodies lying on the stones of her bakehouse.

Not because she wanted the man dead – that part of the arrangement she could do very well without – but because she wanted to know him. She knew the men she made into pies so well. People revealed the most of themselves, all the deformities and lies, all their reality, in the moments just after they no longer possessed their own bodies and just before decomposition claimed their meat forever.

She wanted to know Sweeney as she did those men. She wanted to observe his physique with the reverence that he was due and that he never allowed her to give during their hasty, impersonal nights together. Delve her fingers into the crevices of skin and the slopes of flesh. Turn his every tendon and organ inside out until she knew the intricate details, the shape of all of his sinews, the locations of his fat and of his muscle, the pathway of each vein that once carried blood to a heart he no longer felt.

Sometimes she wished that Sweeney Todd was one of the bodies lying on the stones of her bakehouse. It wasn't actually a wish she wanted her mythical fairy godmother to grant her, or that lie of a God to bless her with, merely one that she was fond of in the hypothetical sense.

But perhaps fairy godmothers weren't as mythical as she believed.

Or maybe God wasn't a lie.

Her knees gave out beneath her and hit the ground. Her palms followed, smacking limply against the stones and aching with an ache she couldn't feel. Her spine curled, nudging her palms further along the ground until her body was posed on all fours, palms and knees pushing into the floor, head hanging down between her raised shoulders, like a base animal. Her right palm slid forward as her left knee did likewise, then her left palm slide forward with her right knee, then again, again, again, crawling across the floor.

Her body stopped moving. Her palms slide backwards and her spine pulled her from all fours onto twos, just her knees now. Her fingers curled into fists and her nails gnawed at her skin. Her neck dripped with sweat and her eyes dripped with tears and her heart clenched like a fist and stopped the drip of blood through her veins and brutalized her body like a thousand knives underneath her skin and, even though her lips could not open, tore from her lungs a savage keen.

He was beautiful even in death, the canonic profile still and refined, tranquil in a way it never had been when possessed with life: the high brow, the curve of the nose, the sealed eyelids, the gently parted lips. The bloodied slit across the throat. She touched her fingers to it. They came away sticky with blood and her throat keened again.

_Shut up. This is what you wanted. This is everything you wanted._

She curled her fingers into a fist, branding his blood into her skin.

_He is truly yours now._

There was only one thing to do, then. Only one path to traverse from here.

She stood, walked to her table filled with butcher tools, retrieved them, returned to her former position, and began to hack away at the meat of Sweeney Todd.

She chopped him up like all the others. Stripped off his clothes with a more professional demeanor than a whore, put her knives into his flesh and watched the blood drip out without a flinch, didn't bother to avert her eyes from his nude form for modesty's sake. Fisted her hands inside his entrails and learned every crevice and path within him and pretended she wasn't crying even though she was the only living person in the room, even though there was no one to pretend for.

_Stop it. This is what you wanted._

Hadn't she wanted to know him like this? And hadn't she wanted herself to survive?

_I wanted him to survive with me._

But this scenario was nearly just as good, was it not? He had not had to kill himself, after all. He could have killed her instead. He could have thrown her into the oven last night – God knew he very nearly had – rather than retreating at the last moment, stumbling away, whispering only, _"It wasn't your hand that did it,"_ as he released her waist.

Instead, he had killed himself. Instead, he had granted her deepest wish: to know him on the most personal level possible. Surely to give her what she wanted most proved that he loved her?

_Or just that he couldn't continue to live after you murdered him._

Her hands shook and she clenched them tighter around his viscera. No. She had not murdered him. He had been the one to slaughter all those hapless men, his wife, and himself with those damned razors that she'd been stupid enough to return to him; she had slaughtered no one.

_The act of murder is not always physical._

For the first time in sixteen years, Nellie Lovett stopped trying to hide her tears. They dripped from her eyes down her cheeks and landed upon the stripped flesh of her lover, her life, sizzling softly as salt water met raw meat.

She bent over, hands still fisted in his offal, eyes still leaking tears, and placed a kiss upon his lips. They were still slightly warm and she shivered against them.

Slowly, she pulled away.

For the first time in sixteen years, Nellie Lovett whispered, _"I'm sorry,"_ and meant it.

For the first time in sixteen years, Nellie Lovett allowed someone else to know her as deeply as though her skin too had been ripped open to reveal all her intestines and organs and truths.

Then she finished hacking at his meat, put him through the grinder, and baked him into her next batch of pies, the last batch of _Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pies_ that would ever contain human flesh.

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**A/N:** As always, reviews are love (though I doubt you're feeling very loving towards me after this depressing tale . . .).


	28. Dessert

30 Kisses #23: candy.

* * *

"Want some dessert, love?" Nellie asked, glowing, as she stuck a plate of wiggling blobs in front of his face.

Sweeney reeled backwards from where he stood by the window, his face pleating in disgust. "What the hell is that?"

She offered the plate towards him, cackling when he drew away from her as hastily as though she were offering him diseases rather than food. "Oh, simply a little something I cooked up . . . don't look afraid, love, I'd never try and hurt you. It's only a little jelly. I just want someone to taste it and tell me if it's any good before I offer it up to the customers."

Nellie often bounced up to his shop like this, wanting him to try some new concoction or other, and he was getting bloody tired of it. He didn't enjoy eating anything, much less her experiments: they were always disgusting, and even if they weren't and he could tolerate the sample, she always made him eat even more of it if he showed even the slightest sign of not being absolutely repulsed.

But today, Sweeney Todd was putting his foot down. Nellie Lovett would make him taste no more of her fodder.

He circled around her, slowly, until he had charted a half moon upon the ground and stood just behind her. Placing his hands upon her waist, he leaned his chin atop her scalp, dancing his fingertips up her sides and murmuring into her hair, "I live by the phrase 'never trust a thin chef' . . ."

She dove out of his grasp and spun to face him, eyes capering like gleeful fiends over his face as his expression drooped. _Dammit._ If she couldn't even be distracted by sex, then he had absolutely no hope of escaping this food tasting.

"Nice try, love," she trilled, reading his mind. She spooned up a bit of the gelatin and held it out to him. "C'mon, now, just a little taste."

He eyed the spoon warily and did not move to take it, mind working furiously: was there any other way he could possibly get out of this . . .?

Nellie took a step towards him, wavering the spoon in front of his nostrils as one might try and tempt a stubborn toddler. "Mmmmm . . ."

Sweeney moved backwards a pace, but she merely took another step forward. Backward, forward, backward, forward, they went – and then Sweeney's back hit the wall. He swore under his breath. Now he was well and truly trapped.

"What on Earth possessed you to try and sell gelatin, anyway?" he asked. If sex couldn't distract her, maybe talking could. She liked babbling nearly as much as sleeping with him, after all. It was a desperate card to play, yes, but it was the last card he still held.

"I dunno," said Nellie, contemplating the spoonful of wiggling jelly. "Just had the urge to try something new, y'know?"

"But – the pies are selling so well – "

"Oh, more than well, Mr. T!" she giggled. "They sell better than hotcakes. I'm just looking to expand my repertoire, I guess. Not get stuck in some sort of rut with just the pies all the time."

"But – you haven't been to the butcher's – so where did the cow for the gelatin come from – "

His eyes grew wide.

"Eleanor," he said, struggling to remain calm, "you didn't – "

Taking advantage of his slack jaw, Nellie popped onto her tip-toes, grasped his chin between her fingers, stuck the spoonful of jelly upon his tongue, and pushed his mouth shut.

"I most certainly did, love," she said matter-of-factly. Her hand remained at his chin, forcing his jaw closed and her dessert to remain in his mouth. "It used to just be that I'd toss all those bones into the oven and watch them char to ashes – but d'you realize how large human skeletons are? Such a _waste_, I always felt . . ."

He made a coughing sound, cheeks burning with disgust and ire and humiliation, trying to free his jaw from her grasp enough to part his lips and spit the stuff in her face. _Dessert_, indeed!

"But then I realized I could make something of those bones," she continued, beaming, basking in the genius of her epiphany. "I could boil them, wait for the stuff what comes out of the boiled bones to solidify – and make some lovely jelly.

"So – " she grinned toothily up at him " – how's it taste, love?"

Sweeney seized her wrist, wrenched her hand away from his face, and hurled the glob of human jelly from his mouth and onto the floor. But – dear God – he grasped his throat as though strangling himself: he could still taste it – he spat upon the ground again but the flavor was still there – everywhere – he inhaled, desperate for a respite, for breathable air –

"Toby quite fancied it," Nellie continued, still smiling, "and so did Jamie – oh, I know cats ain't s'posed to eat human food, but she begged for a taste so earnestly, what was I to do? – but I wanted your opinion too, love."

The taste burned his cheeks, his tongue, his throat – worse than fire, worse than rotten eggs, worse than anything imaginable – he fell to his knees, convulsing, choking, gasping through clogged lungs –

"You know how much I value what you think about my cooking," she chattered on, examining the plate of gelatin with loving eyes, calm and phlegmatic as ever, as though her lover were not writhing in agony upon the floor.

He glared up at her through watering eyes. Couldn't she at least show a _shred_ of pity and fetch him a tumbler of gin?

As though noticing Sweeney for the first time, she glanced down at him, eyebrows raising. "Well, there's no need to make such a scene, love. It can't be _that_ bad: jelly's largely tasteless stuff anyway. This one's only got a bit of sugar mixed in – "

"What – I – you fed me human gelatin," Sweeney spluttered, swallowing large gulps of fresh, glorious air. "We'd agreed – neither of us ever eat your pies – how could you make me – "

"Oh, honestly, Mr. T," she chided. "It's not as though there's any actual flesh in that stuff – it's just the stuff that oozes out of the bones – "

"_People_ bones!"

"I guess yours is a 'nay' vote, then." She started for his shop door, eyes averted, mouth frowning. "Sorry I bothered you, love. I'll remember not to in the future with my nourishments."

Shame flooded over him: he hadn't meant to hurt her feelings – and, well . . . he licked his lips: the jelly wasn't _that_ bad, really, he had to admit to himself. It was more the thought that disgusted him than the actual taste.

"Eleanor – wait."

She froze, hand on his door, and turned back to him slowly, eyes skeptical and guarded.

Sweeney rose to his feet and crossed over to her. Lifting the spoon from her grasp, he carved out another piece of gelatin, fitted it upon the utensil, and placed it in his mouth.

"You don't need to pretend to like it just for my sake," Nellie grumbled.

"I'm not," he said around a mouthful of her dessert.

She glared at him, disbelieving.

He cupped her cheek in his palm and stroked his thumb across her skin. "I'm sorry, pet. You're right – it's not as bad as I was making it seem – and I didn't mean to upset you."

Bringing his face closer to hers, he whispered, "Let me make it up to you . . ."

He kissed her on the lips; she remained unyielding and apathetic beneath his touch for a moment, as she always did when she was angry at him – but, as always, she could only clutch her fury and resist him for so long: soon her body was melting in his embrace, her hands pawing at his shirt, her lips parting against his –

And he delicately pushed the tiny bit of gelatin sitting upon his tongue into her mouth.

Just because he felt ashamed about hurting her feelings didn't mean his usual desire for revenge – whether because of being sent to a prison colony, or because of losing his wife, or because of being made to eat human jelly – could be left unfulfilled.

"_BLERGH!"_ she shouted as she tore herself from his grasp and spat upon the ground, ogling the lump of spittle and gelatin as it undulated against the floor. "What the hell – "

"This is why I live by the phrase 'never trust a thin chef,'" said Sweeney. "One must always sample their own wares to know if they are any good, my dear."

When she turned her glare up to meet his eyes, he only smiled. Oh, yes, revenge did taste _so_ sweet – he licked his lips and eyed the gelatin still in her hands, alarm bells sounding in his head as he realized that his tongue actually craved a third taste – _no _– the taste of revenge was all that Sweeney Todd enjoyed, for revenge tasted so sweet –

Yes: even sweeter than jelly . . .

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**A/N:** Happy Christmas, loves. I thought, after the agony of the last story in this collection, you all could use a bit of fluff and nonsense with this next fic. Expect a return to doom and gloom within the next update, of course (what can I say . . . I'm a naturally angsty person xD).

Reviews are love.


	29. Seven Reasons

30 Kisses #30: kiss; fanfic50 #29: defend.

* * *

**I.**

". . . and it'll be so lovely to have a little cottage by the sea all to ourselves, don't you think? Well, I mean – "

"Do you ever stop talking?" Sweeney grunts.

"Do you ever stop being such a grump?" she returns, then flashes him a smile, leaning her head against his window nonchalantly, as though she too has a claim to it. "I'm only trying to inform you of our future, love. Surely it's not a bad thing, to know where you're headed."

_Our future._

He grits his teeth. How dare she make such assumptions? How dare she dictate his future for him? How dare she entwine her future with his?

". . . anyhow, as I was saying, we won't always be by ourselves – Toby'll be coming along, first off . . ."

Has he ever declared – hell, has he ever even suggested – that they are to have a future together?

". . . and we'll have guests come in and out, a nice little bed and breakfast, y'know . . . we've got to have some source of income, after all . . ."

No. No, of course he has not.

". . . though I do have quite a bit stashed away at the mo', business's been so good lately . . ."

He always ceases to listen when she talks about their wedded life by the seaside, he never shows her any sort of tender affection, he ensures to

_softly tuck a lock of hair behind her ear as she sleeps, loiter his eyes in her direction a little longer than necessary, achingly touch her indent upon his mattress after he demands that she leave the room_

at all times keep his distance. And yet she dares to still talk of _their_ future?

". . . and it'll still leave plenty of time for days of leisure – strolling on the pier – walking by the ocean – lazing all day away inside . . . don't really matter what we do to relax. All the choices'll be there, each and every day, for us to do as we wish. And – " her voice breaks for a moment in desperate, craving hope " – and it'll just be us – together – you and me . . ."

_No. _

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett. She talks too much.

**II.**

"G'morning, love!" she tweets as she bursts through his shop door, as shrill and annoying and _goddamn happy_ as the birds that fled London long ago.

He does not turn acknowledge her; he remains standing before the window, face pressed to the panes. He watches her reflection set a tray, laden with breakfast, upon his bureau. Why does she continue to cook him three meals a day when he hardly eats even half of one?

"Made some porridge for you this morning before we go out today. Y'don't mind going out today, d'you? It's Sunday and so nice outside, for once, so I figured we should take advantage of it, have a picnic in the park . . ."

Her voice remains shrill and annoying as she continues yammering – and remains happy. Through his window he watches the sun rise in a sky that turns from granite to steel to charcoal and then back again, watches smog hover like a permanent disease over the buildings, watches people in the streets spitting and clawing and demolishing each other without a backwards glance –

And she is happy.

How dare she be happy?

_And how does she remain so?_

Her fingers settle against his shoulders and spin him around. Her face beams up at him, ashen skin glowing, muddied eyes alive, wearied mouth curved into an upside-down rainbow.

"C'mon, love," she chirps. "What d'you think? You might think I'm able to read your mind – and sometimes it isn't that hard, really" – she raps his forehead – "what with you usually dwelling on the judge . . . but other times, you do need to actually open your mouth. So – will you come have a picnic with Toby and me?"

"No," he says, but an hour later he's sitting outside on a blanket, a basket bursting with food set before him, the sky the color of pale charcoal, the sun's rays and Nellie's smile both radiating upon his skin and creating angry red burns.

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett. She is too brilliantly happy in a world that is crafted of only shades of gray.

**III.**

The boy is always watching him.

When he enters the pie shop, the boy spins from the sink or the counter and watches him. When he prowls onto the little deck that hovers over the outdoor eatery to examine the crowds, the boy turns his head up from among the customers and watches him. When he rummages through the cupboards for a much-needed drink, the boy peers his head from around the corner and watches him. When he snaps at some passerby while on an errand that she has forced him to run, the boy always seems to be near and watches him. When late at night his hand on her waist begins to wander lower, the boy cracks open his eyes from his drunken doze and watches him.

The boy is always watching him. The boy is always watching him, glaring at him, judging him.

The boy knows too much.

Were the boy not dumb as a doorknob, he would have already connected all the pieces, pieces that he holds but just cannot assemble.

Were Sweeney Todd not bound by the unfortunate necessity of needing a place to live and store victims and extract revenge, and thus needing Nellie's favor, he would have already killed the boy.

How the dare the boy watch him in so overt a manner? How dare the boy judge him so? Young though he is, he isn't innocent either. No one living in 186 Fleet Street could possibly claim that label anymore. And yet the boy seems to think he has the right to watch and judge, to peer through doorways and drink gin by the bottle as though this is _his_ home, to distract Nellie from her purpose, to silently try and make the puzzle pieces fit despite his complete incompetence at the task.

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett. She and the boy are a package deal.

**IV.**

He never experiences the bliss of solitude.

She is there when he wakes up and when he fights against allowing himself to fall asleep. She is there when he chokes down something to eat and when he dresses himself for the day. She is there when he stares out the window and stares at Lucy's picture and stares at his grotesquely cracked image in the mirror while never seeing a damn thing.

Even when he is alone, she is there.

She is there in her shop below him, cooking and chattering loudly to whatever poor sap has just wandered inside. She is there on the bakehouse stairs below him, stomping up and down, too quiet to wake the dead but too forceful to ever let_ him_ forget her presence. She is there in the outdoor eatery area below him, watching him. Smirking at him. Waiting for him and still believing he will come.

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett. She never leaves him alone and she never stops thinking that one day neither of them will live in solitude.

**V.**

". . . and poor Mrs. Mooney's business has just up and dried ever since you and me started – "

"Please stop talking, Mrs. Lovett."

She leans herself against his supine body upon his mattress, bare torso against bare torso, lips budded in a pout. "Now, you know that's not something I'm fond of, Mr. T. Why on Earth should I stop talking? Just so's to make you happy?"

"Yes."

"Nothing makes you happy, love," she laughs out loud, head dropping onto his chest as she convulses with giggles.

He scowls even though her face is pressed into his skin and she thus cannot see the scowl. "Stop moving and be quiet. I can't finish your hair with you flopping around like a fish on land."

She ceases her laughter and holds still. His hands resume their former place amongst her mass of hair and begin again to braid the strands, fingers weaving deftly and comfortably through the curls.

Nellie's vow of silence lasts all of ten seconds: "There's really no point trying to finish that braid up, love. I've got a sorry excuse for hair and I'm quite aware of it. I gave up decades ago trying to make it look presentable. Between the tangles, the frizz, and just how damn obstinate the curls are, it's really just a pointless – "

"Shut up," Sweeney growls, and she lets out another giggle that jars her head and jars his fingers and makes him grit his teeth, but after that she quiets.

She is not lying about her hair being a disaster: the curls fight him every step of the way, refusing to position or stay still as he desires, and his hands constantly find themselves caught in massive snarls. But his fingers continue on, unknotting snarls, coaxing the locks in place, braiding the strands . . .

Until, at last, his work is complete.

Satisfied, Sweeney withdraws his hands. Noticing the removal of his fingers from her scalp, Nellie sits up, and the long braid – curls tidied and neat, not a single strand out of place and not a tangle still present – swings from her face and down her back. "It's done? You actually got it to co-operate with you?

He looks at her, admiring against his will both his handiwork and her complete ease with her nude body. "Yes."

She springs up from her bed and bounds over to his cracked mirror, the braid whipping against her bare shoulders as she tosses her head forward to let it fall across her chest and be visible in the mirror. She stares at her reflection and he stares at her reflection and for a moment neither of them move.

Then her reflected mouth breaks into a grin wider than the break in the mirror.

Her fingers reach up to touch the braid, in wonder at his ability to remove all the tangles, at how every strand is captured in the braid – at how at last she feels beautiful, and how he wanted her to look beautiful. . . .

As she admires her hair and he admires her admiring it, he who sees nothing suddenly sees too clearly – sees a woman standing in front of that mirror before it cracked, admiring her braided blonde locks – and his admiration molds with ferocious suddenness into hatred, fury . . .

"It looks beautiful, love," is all that Nellie says, for once satisfied by as few words as possible. She turns back to him, fingers playing lovingly over the braid, face beaming – but her smile falls the moment she glimpses his expression.

He rolls over onto his stomach and presses his face into the pillow so she cannot see, enraged with her – loathing her – loathing himself –

Sweeney Todd will never marry Nellie Lovett. He despises her sorry excuse for hair even more than she does.

**VI.**

". . . and all those fifteen years that you were gone and I was here . . ."

Why does she persistently bring up the fact that she survived fifteen years without him around?

Does she believe he thinks her incapable? Because he doesn't know how she could believe he thinks her that: she's more than proven by now that she can pull her own weight, and then some . . . that she can endure far more than most men or women could.

Does she believe he does not recognize that she committed to stay on Earth even when Lucy didn't?

Because he does recognize that. Oh, he doesn't want to recognize it, and he won't ever tell Nellie that he recognizes it, but he does. He doesn't want to recognize the fact that Lucy broke under her own weight, that she did not wait for his return, that she did not believe him when he promised that he would return –

He doesn't want to recognize that Nellie didn't break. That she did wait. That she did believe him and still does, even when he doesn't.

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett. She refuses to break in the world that broke his wife, and he cannot allow that.

**VII.**

"Why're you so opposed to marriage, Mr. Todd?"

Startled by her frankness, his gaze turns from the unlit fireplace to her eyes. Not that Nellie isn't normally frank . . . simply that she's usually not frank about anything important, about anything related to his past. She knows better than that – or so he thought.

"I mean," she says, trying to strike a relaxed pose by leaning back in her chair, ruining the effect by anxiously rubbing her dress between her fingertips, "we're very nearly living like a married couple already, what with sharing a home, revenues, a bed – "

Her easy bluntness on this subject always astounds him; not even a whore could speak about sharing a bed with a man with that same simple cadence, with not a modest blush nor a seductive grin, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

" – and the gin, of course. So actually getting wed really wouldn't change all that much in our day-to-day lives."

He does not answer.

She abandons the pretense of relaxation and leans forward, hands gripping her knees, lips pressed so tightly together the blood flees and turns them white, expression searching, hoping, adoring, yearning for him to see her and want her too.

"Lucy's gone, love," she whispers. "Nothing's going to change that – not killing all these men, not getting your hands on Turpin, not staring into your photos and willing her to come back. . . . she's not here and never will be, and I – " she swallows hard before forcing out the syllables she's only ever allowed her eyes to say " – I love you."

He looks at her but does not reply. Whether she is aware of it or not, she has just given herself the answer:

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett because she loves him.

Because she wants to marry him and he hates giving her what she wants. Because he still wants to be married to Lucy and to wed another would be a lie, a final betrayal he cannot commit. Because it scares him and angers him all at once that she can love the monster he's become, because he doesn't know how she can.

She is still leaning forward upon the armchair. Her body is as taut and tense and vibrant as wires; her eyes are upon him, alight with all the flames that the fireplace cannot hold tonight.

Sweeney Todd will not marry Nellie Lovett because he's running out of reasons not to.

* * *

**A/N:** Only one kiss left, my dear readers! I must admit I'm quite sad about the inevitable end to this little collection of fics . . .

Reviews are, and remain forevermore, love.


	30. So Let's Keep Living

30 Kisses #27: overflow; fanfic50 #43: spooky.

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". . . but on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared . . ."

Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett sit on a pew in the back of the local church.

Were it any other day, neither of them would tolerate this: their nightly prayers to His deaf ears had been abandoned long ago. As it happens, though, it is Easter Sunday, and so they can be nowhere else at present. One has to keep up appearances, after all.

". . . and they found the stone rolled away from the tomb . . ."

It wasn't easy to persuade Sweeney that this was necessary. There was a moment, in fact – with she pulling with both hands at a comb that was stuck in his mass of hair (as she'd been trying to shape it into some form of decency) and he growling like a wounded animal stripped of all its pride (well, a wounded animal that, despite its wound, could still probably overpower her any minute) – when she seriously doubted if she'd ever get them both out of the house in one piece.

". . . but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus . . ."

Yet here they are, dressed even finer than some of the other townsfolk (including Mrs. Mooney, she notes with satisfaction), with their hair at least mildly tamed and with their attires free of both flour stains and blood blotches.

Yes, Nellie decides, she did very well indeed.

". . . while they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel . . ."

Not that she has any idea what is going on, or is even trying to listen. It's been fifteen years since Nellie Lovett attended a church service of any sort. Without the holy privilege of gazing at the back of Benjamin Barker's head, his dark locks gleaming gold in the sunlight filtered through the mosaic windows, there were simply no benefits to attending church. Besides, what sort of God would allow for Benjamin to be shipped all the way to bloody Australia without any sort of justice? No God that she wanted to associate with or talk to, that was for certain.

". . . and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground . . ."

Times, however, have changed. Now she no longer has the holy privilege to gaze at the back of Benjamin's head – she is blessed with the miracle of being able to twine her arm with his and lean her skull upon his shoulder. Oh, and people do stare so, but what does she care? If Jesus is allowed to break social propriety (really, but how is it at all acceptable for a man to rise from the grave? imagine if people were to begin doing it all the time; populations would become completely out of whack), then certainly she should be allowed to as well by resting her head against the shoulder of a man she's not properly wed to.

". . . the men said to them, 'Why do you seek the living among the dead?'"

For the first time during the two hour service, Nellie's ears prick, intrigued by the priest's words. So much of the sermon is useless – it's all so irrelevant to every day life; if God actually did care about His people as He's supposed to, he might take a bit more interest in what's going on _now_ than what happened several hundred or thousand or whatever years ago – and yet –

And yet . . .

_Why do you seek the living among the dead?_

For the first time during the two hour service, Nellie has found something that makes the entire duration worth it, something far from irrelevant. Is that not what Sweeney Todd does every bloody day, after all? Searching for the remnants of his wife among they who still live, nurturing his picture frame and his memories as though she can be called again to life?

". . . he is not here, but has risen . . ."

She turns her eyes upward towards Sweeney, to see how he has been affected by these words, daring to hope they will penetrate his conscious and change the way he lives, the way he treats the spirit of his wife, the way he sees the woman sitting tangible and alive right next to him –

He is staring at his lap, at his hands as they gently weave through the air, fondling the invisible razor she forbid him to tangibly bring along.

". . . Lord Jesus Christ, who upon this day did conquer death and rise from the dead, and who are alive forevermore . . ."

She turns her gaze away, swallowing the dry bile of her fantasies.

_And what did you expect, Lovett? For some stupid words from a random bloody priest to change the way he lives when not even _you_'ve been able to change it?_

". . . help us to never forget your Risen Presence, forever with us . . ."

Besides, she muses, an acrid smile undulating upon her lips, she should learn to practice what she preaches. Does she not do the very same thing as her lover, after all? Trying to make a dead thing live again?

". . . you turn our darkness into light, and in the light, we may see . . ."

Her heart thrums and aches with life, too much life, inside her body; she shudders a gasp through her nostril from its force, clutching a hand to her chest as though about to be sick, repressing the urge to shriek and writhe upon the floor from the pain.

". . . Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer: Christ the Lord is risen today . . ."

The woman sitting next to her glances at her knowingly, her eyes moist. _Great._ Now everyone in the church thinks she's had a moving, deeply spiritual moment.

Nellie strains a smile upon her face before lolling her head against Sweeney's shoulder and closing her eyes, sweat beading on her brow, sunlight refracting upon her skin. The white rays filtering through the windows are made colorful by the holy mosaics and cause her normally chalky complexion to glow rosily golden, like the picture of a woman luxurious in health and happiness, like a saint.

_Please, God. I don't know if you can hear me – or if you're even there – or if someone as wicked as me even has a right to try and get your attention . . . but please, if you can hear, and if you are there, and if you're willing – please let us both exist among the living again._

". . . Amen."

The sounds of rustling fabric against wood and footsteps upon the ground fill the air. Nellie opens her eyes: the service is over. Everyone is leaving.

"Are you alright?" growls a voice very close to her ear.

She tilts her head upon his shoulder to glance into his face: she can't delude herself into thinking his apathetic expression actually is a mask for concern, but at least he's asking about her, at least the words are concerned . . .

_And far too late. You've only been sweating and shaking next to him for, oh, I don't know, well on ten minutes now._

"'Course I am, love," says Nellie bracingly. Securing her arm around his, she pulls them both to their feet and joins the throng of people strolling out the doors and onto the sidewalk. "C'mon, then. No point hanging around here any longer than we've got to."

"Wait," he says, pausing just outside the doorway, forcing her to stumble to a halt beside him.

"What?"

But he's already striding forward and, their arms still twined together, she trips along behind him.

He is heedless of the crowd; people are forced to part around him rather than a mutual side-stepping, and she can only flash them an apologetic smile before they barrel through. She doesn't realize he's pulling her into the church cemetery until she staggers past a cracked, aged tombstone dressed up for the Easter celebration by pure white lilies all around its edges.

Her heart lurches into her throat: he is looking for Lucy's grave.

Swallowing more dry bile, pressing her arm tighter against his to remind him of her solidity and her warmth and her life and her everything that Lucy cannot give him, she says, "Mr. Todd, listen – Lucy doesn't have a tombstone – "

His feet hurtle forward, his head remains facing ahead, not acknowledging her words, as they dash past the headstones and their lilies.

" – suicides aren't – well, they're not a very Christian thing to do – so Turpin wouldn't allow for her to – be properly buried beside a church – "

Still he presses onward, racing straight ahead as though he never intends to stop. His eyes do not dart from gravestone to gravestone as she expects them to as he searches for Lucy – perhaps that is not his purpose? What other possible purpose could he have within a cemetery though?

Sweeney comes to such an abrupt halt that she again nearly topples to the ground, only just managing to catch herself.

Panting, perplexed and worried, she rubs a stitch in her side. "You could warn me when you're about to stop running, love."

He ignores her, or perhaps he cannot hear her: dropping her arm, he strides towards the largest grave marker in the cemetery, a marble mausoleum, and falls to his knees before its steps, legs indenting the spread of grass and white lilies.

Something about the sight – about a living dead man kneeling before the grave of a fellow deceased being – spooks her and jolts a shudder down her spine.

Before she can ask what he's doing, he scoops two of the Easter lilies into his hands, one for each palm, and rises to his feet, lugging his legs in her direction with great effort. When he finally stands less than a foot away from her, he stops and raises his eyes to meet hers, the flowers cupped like glass in his hands. Her breath hitches and her fingers reach out to take the flowers that he is giving her –

"For Lucy," he mutters in explanation. "Lilies were her favorite. Missing flowers won't be noticed from a grave that already has more than it needs."

Nellie lowers her hands. Plasters a smile onto her mouth. "How thoughtful of you, Mr. T."

She spins away from him and starts back towards the kissing gate before her smile crumbles and reveals the pain cleaving her insides. Her lips tremble as she calls out, "Shall we head back now?"

He catches up to her and, side by side, they stroll out of the cemetery and onto the sidewalk, their hair still mildly tamed, their Sunday best slightly crinkled but still unstained, the white rays of sunlight glossy upon their waxy skins, no longer making her skin glow healthily and saintly without the many colors of the church's mosaic windows.

Her heart aches and thrums but she doesn't feel the need to gasp aloud this time, doesn't have to swallow her cries of pain: this pain is silent, ripping at her soul rather than stealing her air, destroying her possibility of a hereafter rather than her chance of existing among the alive.

_Alright, God. You've made your point loud and clear: demons should never ask for Your help. Don't worry. I'll never try asking again._

As though He desires to smite her one final time before letting her be, the sun suddenly disappears behind a torrent of dark clouds, siphoning the light from their skins –

And then it starts to rain.

Not droplets, but buckets. Water pours, rushes, gushes down upon them, sloshing from the skies to the cadence of thunder.

They are both drenched in an instant, their hair plastered to their skulls with loose tendrils clinging to their moist faces, their Sunday best sticking to them in a second skin.

"Well, thank you, God!" Nellie screams into the skies, throwing her hands into the air – because if she doesn't scream, she will start to sob heavier than the skies. "It's an Easter miracle indeed – as if you hadn't given me enough already, you've gone and ruined my best dress! Praise the Lord, and Jesus too, and all the angels and saints and whatever the hell else's up there and having a good long laugh at me –"

"_Mrs. Lovett!"_

The sound of his voice always turns her towards him immediately; the sound of his voice filled with genuine panic whirls her towards him faster than the bolt of lightning as it illuminates London and his body:

Sweeney kneels in the middle of the road, on all fours like an animal, head bent towards the ground. As though his clothes weren't ruined enough from the rain, crawling upon the pavement has added a layer of dirt to his pants all the way up to his knees.

"Mr. T – what the hell're you – "

"I dropped one of Lucy's lilies," he says, his eyes scanning the streets as they fill with water, watching the scattered junk of London's inhabitants float by.

Nellie roars with laughter.

His gaze snap from the ground to her face, eyes wide and focused upon reality – upon her – for the first time all morning, all day . . . perhaps all year.

She laughs harder at the sight, doubling over with her hands on her knees: even the dead man who sees nothing can finally see that a woman still living doesn't know how to survive much longer.

"And to think I actually thought the concern in your voice just now was for _me_," she guffaws. "That makes, what, the third time today I've dared to hope – and actually started to believe – you cared about me? That makes the millionth fucking time in my lifetime that I've believed it?"

Slowly, Sweeney stands, his one Easter lily no longer held gingerly in his palm, but crushed in his fist.

"I'm done believing, love," she informs him, no longer laughing, just shouting into the streets, to everyone and no one who cares to listen. "I'm done believing in you – in you and me – in us ever being together, being more than we are – being alive – "

He starts walking out of the road and back to where she stands on the sidewalk.

" – and I stopped believing God wanted to help me years ago, but I dared to believe in Him, too, today – "

He keeps moving towards her, his feet as purposeful and relentless as when he entered the cemetery, his eyes as fixed straight ahead. His eyes fixed straight ahead upon her.

" – and He let me down, of course, just as He always does – He enjoys watching me suffer – you and Him aren't that different, y'know, you both enjoy _that_ a good deal – "

The ground beneath her feet tilts as he approaches and she finds herself dizzy, light-headed, wobbly on legs that have never before faltered.

" – perhaps you should try talking to Him sometimes, you'd probably have more luck than – "

He continues drawing nearer, nearer, ever nearer.

" – than – than me – "

He grasps her face between hands that practically claw her face with their vehemence and rams his mouth upon hers, swallowing her anger and her torment and leaving her hollow, leaving her capable of nothing but to sag in his arms, drained. He grasps onto her as though he'll drown if he doesn't, as though this rain will overflow the streets and overflow his soul until there's nothing left but the shell of a man, empty and dry.

It's always been a fantasy of hers, to be kissed in the rain. To be ravished by a man's raw need beneath sodden skies, knowing that he cannot wait for a more proper time when they will not be seen by prying, public eyes. To feel the contrast of the cold rain and his hot breath against her skin all at once.

But when she actually finds herself kissing in the rain, it's much less desirable than she's imagined. It's cold out here, and bloody uncomfortable, and she'd much rather be tucked beneath blankets with warm coals than standing out here, sopping wet, her mouth tangled with another's as rain drips down her body and drips between their lips and freezes her to her core.

But she'll be damned if she's going to pull away now, now when he's showering affection upon her heavier than this overwhelming rain. She'll be damned if she's not going to grasp his saturated garments just as firmly, grapple his lips with her own just as brutally, push her body against his just as ardently.

At last he pulls away, but keeps his forehead leaning against her, his breath falling warm and dry against her moist skin. Reluctantly, she opens her eyes, and discovers he is already looking into hers, gaze dark and focused.

Ever aware of her public image, her gaze dives past him for a moment to see if any passerbys have seen: and oh, do they see. There are people everywhere – though admittedly less than before the thunderstorm began, they still mill about the streets – and each and every one of them clearly sees the barber and the baker standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Each and every one of them purses their lips or scowls, averts their gaze, steps into the middle of the road to avoid stumbling into the pair.

A bubble of triumph wells in her stomach. Normally she and Sweeney go to great care to ensure that no prying, scandalized eyes might see their them together indecently. Yet part of her always wished they would see. Then her claim to him would not just be her own, silent, never spoken or hinted of in any hours but the precious few that he permits her in the darkness between her sheets; then her claim to him would be validated by others knowing, by him unable to escape and deny it any longer.

And they _have_ seen now.

The victorious bubble quivers then pops as her gaze finds his again, as the anger and torment he had siphoned from her lips again floods down her throat and convulses through her entire body, dulled by pressure of his fingertips against her flesh but no less thorough.

"I meant what I said, love," she murmurs against his lips. "I'm done willing myself to believe in healing you – in making you realize you're among the alive – in us ever having . . ." She swallows that thought before she can ever vocalize it again, before she can cut herself any deeper than she already has with continued wishing and wanting and believing. "In everything impossible."

His eyes darken and gleam upon her all at once, like the soiled rain spilling from the skies, grimy but still gleaming. Like hope.

He removes one hand from her face and unfurls his fingers, showing her the one Easter lily he still holds. The flower is crumpled beyond repair, its petals distorted and bedraggled, its pure white color stained brown from the road overflowing with dirty water.

"And I mean this, Nellie," he says.

He drops Lucy's lily into the road and allows it to wash away with the stream before again bringing his lips to hers.

* * *

**A/N:** Improbably fluffy? Perhaps. But I figured that I've put you all through enough doom-'n'-gloom lately. Besides, I wanted to end on a happy note.

A final gigantic shout-out to every single person who has ever reviewed, messaged me about, or even just silently read this fic. Writing can be such a solitary, isolating experience, and it's always so wonderful to be able to share my random scribblings with such an engaged audience. Hugs, kisses, and virtual brownies to you all.

Several of you have been asking me if I will now begin a new collection of Toddvett drabbe/one-shot thingies. The brief answer is no. Frankly, I think I need a break from the ST fandom. It's not that I no longer love ST - I do, with a deeper passion than I can ever convey! - but I've been writing in this fandom for around five years. I need to play around with something new for a while.

That said, to all of my readers of my novel, _Death Is For The Alive_ - fear not! That ST work is still alive and kicking, and I have absolutely no plans to abandon it before its finale. To all of you who are NOT currently reading my novel . . . what are you doing with your lives?! xD No, but in all seriousness, if you're looking to get your ST fix and feel completely lost now that I've completed this Toddvett series, do check out DIFTA. In a nutshell, it chronicles the afterlives of our favorite barber and baker. There are currently twenty-two chapters posted, and there are around a dozen more to come!

Thank you again, dear readers, for sticking it out with me for all thirty kisses.

And, please remember, reviews are love.


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